LOOK AT US

It’s tedious being the entertainment capital of the world. “The Hills” might be L.A.’s most visible cultural export today, but it misrepresents us. (OK, not all of us.) In the last 20 years, Southern California has cultivated a supremely vibrant art scene.

To celebrate, more than 30 museums, galleries, nonprofit spaces, retailers and other venues are banding together for Los Angeles Art Weekend, a sort of giant art walk across the city (with stops in Valencia and Newport Beach too). Produced by ForYourArt, a self-proclaimed “meta-curator” that publishes a quarterly map and cultural guide to the L.A. scene, and the New York-based art production firm Black Frame, Art Weekend is one of the more ambitious attempts to spotlight visual art, as well as architecture, performing arts, music, cinema and more. Says ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek, “The idea is to bring art to the public and to draw attention to the incredible depth of L.A.’s cultural landscape.”

That landscape is dotted with a number of achievements in the last few years: With the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Culver City’s emergence as a center of gravity for the modern set and downtown’s thriving Gallery Row, the synergy between producers, purveyors and consumers of art has never been stronger.

The hope of the four-day Art Weekend is that once participants get a taste of what’s out there, they’ll develop an insatiable desire for more. The following tour of some of the event’s offerings will help whet your appetite.

A PICTURESQUE THURSDAY

Decision-making gets painful as three concurrent events vie for your attention. The first is called “An Evening With Albert Maysles” at the Hammer Museum. The “direct cinema” pioneer of “Gimme Shelter” and “Grey Gardens” fame will screen his filmed portraits of Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Marlon Brando and others. He’ll also be signing copies of his book of photography called “A Maysles Scrapbook.”

“People know me for my cinematography,” says Maysles, who is working on a film about Rufus Wainwright. “But I happened to look in some old boxes and I discovered that I had a lot of photos that I took in Turkey and Russia in the ‘50s, and that’s the book.”

7 p.m., free, seating first come first served. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. (310) 206-3456, www.hammer.ucla.edu

Occupying the same time slot is the Italian Cultural Institute’s opening of a traveling exhibit of the work of Milanese designer Enzo Mari. Institute director Francesca Valente, who organized the show, says that Mari’s importance is due to the expert way he melds “intellectual elegance to the utility of each object he has created.” Mari will be there to answer questions and receive a lifetime achievement award from the institute.

“There are over 60 objects,” Valente says. “Chairs, tables, wastepaper baskets, things nobody notices that, in his hands, become works of art.”

7 to 9 p.m., free. 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood. (310) 443-3250, www .iiclosangeles.esteri.it

Lastly, photographer Catherine Opie will open an exhibition of new photographs at Regen Projects II. The photos of high school football players, which Opie refers to as “football landscapes,” were taken in Alaska, Louisiana, San Diego and L.A.

“Football is one of the ways we perceive the idea of the American landscape and identity,” says Opie, who has spent much of her career documenting the subtleties of everyday life. Twenty-four portraits and 12 large landscapes will be on view.

6 to 8 p.m., free. 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. (310) 276-5424, regenprojects .com

For a dose of urban heat, head to the Downtown Art Walk. Art walk founder Bert Green of Bert Green Fine Art says that nearly four years after its inception, the monthly walk has grown from eight galleries and 100 visitors to 35 galleries and between 2,000 and 3,000 visitors. Green says that kind of growth is reflective of the fertile ground artists have found in L.A.

“Art Weekend is perfect for bringing together what has been happening organically in L.A. for the past 10 years,” Green says. “If you looked at L.A. 20 years ago and then looked at it again today, you wouldn’t even recognize it. Suddenly L.A. has become this massive cultural scene.”

12 to 9 p.m., free. Downtown L.A. downtownartwalk.com

FRIDAY, WE’RE IN LOVE

Art is popping up everywhere, and nowhere more literally than at the first “pop-up storefront” of New York’s lauded gallery Storefront for Art and Architecture. Located in the old Paperchase Printing pressroom on Sunset Boulevard, the Storefront’s inaugural L.A. exhibit will be “CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed,” featuring French lensman Frederic Chaubin’s futuristic photos of fantastical structures built during the last two decades of the Cold War.

Storefront director Joseph Grima says that L.A. is “steeped in architectural culture” and that “being in the city I get the feeling that people aren’t aware of how rich their own culture is. They’re modest in that way.”

7 p.m., free; ends May 17. 7176 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, storefrontnews.org

Our modesty becomes us. When BCAM opened and Eli Broad said he thought L.A. could blossom into the contemporary art capital of the world, we secretly knew that we would settle for nothing less than global domination. But what is title-stealing blood sport without a bit of refinement?

To that end BCAM is extending its hours until 9 p.m. on Friday and hosting two hours of free jazz from Alan Pasqua and the Antisocial Club. “We call our jazz nights ‘L.A.’s treasure,’ ” says Jane Burrell, LACMA’s vice president for education and public programs. “Because we have the greatest jazz musicians in the world.”

Jazz, 6 to 8 p.m., free; museum admission, $12 adults, $8 seniors and students, children younger than 18 free, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (323) 857-6115, lacma.org

For cinema-based art, head to the L.A. outpost of agnes b. The French designer is as concerned with film as she is fashion. Several years ago, she co-founded an indie production company named O’Salvation, with Harmony Korine, maker of postmodern teen cinema verite (most notably 1995’s HIV shocker “Kids”).

The show at agnes b is the work of Korine’s friend, photographer Brent Stewart, who followed the cast and crew of Korine’s new film “Mister Lonely” from Panama to Scotland to Paris, snapping photos of unscripted moments. The film, starring Samantha Morton, probes the world of a group of celebrity impersonators who live in a Scottish castle.

Stewart describes the filmmaking environment as a “visual feast” and recalls a favorite portrait of the French actor who played a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. “One day he and I went down to a lake by the castle and he began reciting French symbolist poetry. He was wearing a Russian fur cap with a cane and golf shoes. That’s when I took the picture.”

6 to 8 p.m., free, RSVP events@ agnesb.net; 100 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A. (310) 271-9643.

NO SNORING ON SATURDAY

It’s not every day you get to sip white wine beneath a $37,500 Swarovski crystal chandelier. So take advantage of the opportunity and get your swerve on at Moss. Moss specializes in limited-edition art furniture and has about 150 items on display, including the aforementioned chandelier by Dutch designer Tord Boontje and a $75,000 chair by sought-after Brazilian designers the Campana brothers. “The chair has a metal frame covered with different fabrics rolled up and cut to open up over time like blossoming flowers,” says gallery director Timothy Daly.

4 to 7 p.m. starts today-Saturday, free. 8444 Melrose Ave., L.A. (323) 866-5260, mossonline.com

Once you’re so full of wine and crystals that you get confused with Elizabeth Taylor in the bathroom, mosey on down to Culver City for the grand opening of the conceptual cafe/shop/art space Royal/T. The place is a Japanese maid cafe, which means your waitress will be dressed in a frilly brown-and-white maid’s uniform with white knee socks and a matching apron. Her outfit will make her a real-life example of the theme of Royal/T’s opening exhibition, “Just Love Me.” The show explores the dark implications and significance of “cuteness” in modern culture and includes work by heavy hitters such as Ghada Amer, Cindy Sherman and Takashi Murakami.

8 to 10 p.m., free, RSVP required: rsvp@fyaworld.com, 8910 Washington Blvd., Culver City. (310) 559-6300, royal-t.org

Wrap up your evening with a politically charged dose of entertainment in the form of the cabaret show “Weimar New York” at the Green Door in Hollywood. The notoriously hard-to-get-into club resembles the lush, elaborate environment of a 1920s German or French cabaret bar. That’s why the show’s producers Earl Dax (who founded the troupe in New York two years ago) and Duncan Roy thought it the perfect space for their unique brand of drag-queen-heavy performance art, which includes an extremely convincing George W. Bush impersonator who gets naked.

“The show takes its references from the ‘30s but uses a very contemporary polemic,” Roy says. “It talks about what it’s like to be living in America today using performers who have crafted their careers around telling the truth in the most funny and relevant way possible.”

10 p.m. starts today-Sun., $45 general, $125 VIP seating. 1429 Ivar Ave., Hollywood. www.weimarny.com

LAZY SUNDAY? HARDLY

Perhaps nothing so perfectly illustrates how far Los Angeles has traveled in the artistic universe than the story of the famed Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. Founded out of necessity in 1957 (L.A. suffered from a dismal dearth of options at the time) by curator Walter Hopps and artist Edward Kienholz, the gallery hosted a number of notable exhibits, including work by Wallace Berman, Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin as well as Andy Warhol’s first solo show.

Writer and curator Kristine McKenna authored a book about the gallery called “The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin,” and she’ll be talking about the as-yet-unreleased book at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. McKenna will arrange her discussion and presentation around screenings about two 1963 L.A. art happenings (a Warhol documentary about his exhibit at Ferus and a documentary about Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective) and two modern-day art happenings (a film by Tom Christie called “Moving Serra” about moving Richard Serra’s behemoth LACMA-bound sculpture “Sequence” across country on 12 flatbed trucks; and a film by Jackson Price and Bryan Law called “The Work,” featuring artists such as Ed Moses, Chris Burden and Larry Bell).

“In the ‘60s L.A. had a bit of a chip on its shoulder because it was trying to establish its relevancy, and New York was really snobby about it,” McKenna says. “But that’s over now. New York isn’t the center of the world and we’re not trying to prove anything anymore.”

3 p.m., $10, general, $8, students and seniors. 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 260-1528, aerotheatre.com

Also worth your time on the last day of the weekend are the California Institute of the Arts Master of Fine Arts open studios. 2 to 7 p.m., free, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia, calartsopenstudios .info/; and the Getty Center’s ongoing “California Video” exhibition, which highlights the encyclopedic quality and often bizarre nature of California’s obsession with the portable art of video making. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., free, parking $8, 1200 Getty Drive, Brentwood. getty.edu

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LOS ANGELES ART WEEKEND

WHERE: Various locations, including the Hammer Museum, Getty Center, LACMA, MOCA, Orange County Museum of Art and Sci-ARC

WHEN: today through Sunday

PRICE: Varies

INFO: laartweekend.com, losangeles.foryourart.com