Feeling old-guard, not avant-garde

I live in New York -- downtown Manhattan -- and whenever I’m out of the city in some smaller, slower, easier and more humane place for more than 48 hours, I start to worry about getting too soft to return to it without psychic trauma. Two days away from crowded subways, sidewalk garbage mountains and surly deli clerks and I start to fear that my reflexes have grown a tick too slow, my streetwiseness a bit dumber, and my art-world acumen a shade too naive for life in Gotham.

The funny thing is that the prospect of returning to my hometown of Los Angeles (I get here twice, maybe three times a year) strikes me with the same cold-sweat trepidation -- especially art-wise.

Much of this dread, of course, has to do with age. I’m a relative geezer of 63 and entered the art world in the early 1960s, in what I’d call the late academic phase of bohemianism. Lots of teaching jobs were around to cushion an artist’s “integrity.”

We thought that fine art was nobly quarantined from advertising, the fashion industry and show business; that galleries existed to make aesthetic statements, not money; and that museums documented art history instead of creating it. “Theory” was a lot of pretentious nerd blather any passionate artist could easily do without. I’m also an old-fashioned abstract painter (and not a photo/text/video/installation purveyor of politically spiced sociological entertainment), who’s most comfortable with art objects that stay quiet and stand still.

L.A.’s contemporary art world is younger and hipper than New York’s.

It operates more emphatically than New York’s on the opposites (except perhaps for the teaching jobs) of everything cited. In L.A., the big competition seems to be among graduate-school studio programs rather than galleries; some students are scouted for gallery recruitment even before their master of fine arts theses shows have gone up. The ratio of big-time contemporary collector dollars to working young artists is greater in L.A. than anywhere else, including New York. Whenever I’m asked, I tell ambitious art students in the heartland to head west, not east, to try to get noticed.

But many young L.A. artists also experience the career arcs of top models or fruit flies: about one season, if that. And nowhere in the country -- maybe the world -- is popular culture more expertly conceived, technologically amped, attractively packaged, and overwhelmingly pervasive -- even unto gallery art -- as in Southern California. A few weeks ago, I prowled around Otis College of Art and Design and thought that if they’d just present the sketchbooks and mock-ups from the toy design department as the fine arts theses shows, Santa Monica galleries would snap ‘em up whole.

This most recent trip out, however, I didn’t do the galleries. The occasion for my weeklong visit was a retrospective at USC of 30 years’ worth of my own painting, and the preparations thereto took up almost all the time. It was -- no fault of Selma Holo, the director of Fisher Gallery -- nerve-racking.

Self-appraisal and nostalgia

Perhaps (or perhaps not) conflict-of-interest issues stemming from my being the art critic at Newsweek since 1989 have meant I haven’t had a survey show like this before; I had no idea what my “life lived in art,” as Selma put it, would look like on the walls. First impression: Fantastic! They ought to make this permanent, like the the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston. Second impression: Awful! They ought to back the truck up to the loading dock door right now and get this stuff outta here. Finally: Settling toward “not bad,” surprisingly upbeat. And here I’d thought I was a mordant, faux-Sartrean existentialist.

What other art I did see -- the Robert Smithson and Ed Ruscha shows at MOCA, an exhibition of ‘50s and ‘60s geometric abstraction at Otis -- was almost soothingly nostalgic, relatively speaking. As were where we stayed (Mount Washington), and where we ate our first-night-in-town dinner (Barragan’s, near Echo Park, which used to be a kind of a splurge when my wife, Laurie, and I were living in a downtown loft 20 years ago).

A highlight of the trip was a quirky memory-lane driving tour of L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard spine that I gave four New Yorkers who came out for the opening: Union Station, Angelus Temple, the heart-stopping approach to Silver Lake from Baxter Street, John Marshall High School (yep, class of ‘58), the views from the Griffith Observatory, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Sunset Strip, ostentatious homes in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, UCLA’s and Pepperdine’s campuses, and a concluding drink at a Malibu bar overlooking floodlighted rocks, waves and pelicans.

It was so pleasant, in fact, that I was a little reluctant to get on the airplane home. Moreover, I still hadn’t had the chance to buy a pair of sneakers at one of those giant sporting goods chains’ sales. (In New York, they think $10 off a pair is a real good deal.) But would I want to come back to L.A. to live? No. In the first place, I could never, ever again get up to speed with the contemporary art world in Los Angeles. And in the second, no matter what my paintings may say, I’ve grown to love cold, miserable, existentialist weather.

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‘Peter Plagens: An Introspective’

Where: USC Fisher Gallery, Harris Hall, USC campus, Exposition Boulevard at USC Watt Way

When: Noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Ends: Feb. 12

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 740-4561, www.usc.edu/fishergallery

Also

What: “A Simple Country Painter.” Plagens discusses being an abstract painter in 1960s Los Angeles and the evolution of his career as an artist and critic in 21st century New York.

Where: Gin D. Wong Auditorium, Harris Hall, Room 101, USC

When: 6-7:30 p.m. Feb. 10

Price: Free, but reservation required

Contact: (213) 740-5537