NYT: The L.A. art world looks to the world
From expanding museums to scrappy galleries, the city is witnessing a contemporary art boom. But has it lost something in the churn of a global market?
By Jason Farago
LOS ANGELES — You keep insisting that this city’s artists don’t need New York’s approval, and then what happens? When the whole world shows up at the biggest coming-out party yet for the Los Angeles art market, it takes place against a Manhattan facade.
Over half a century, L.A. has nursed its own practice of artistic experimentation, steered by the best art education programs in the country, with its own traditions of airy minimalism, wily conceptual projects, abject installations, and politically engaged performance and public art. The galleries and collectors around it have matured to the point that London’s Frieze Art Fair staged its first West Coast edition in late February on a Hollywood backlot built to resemble a New York street.
Audiences did not need an advanced degree in semiotics to get the joke. As Travis Diehl, among the most perceptive young art critics in this rambling city, wrote in 2017, “NY thrills to style LA as a golden-hour dreamland that never quite wakes up; LA gladly concedes to NY the status of the overbearing and immutable reality it rejects.” They’re thoroughly codependent, New York and Los Angeles, and affirm their cultural identities by looking at the other with oscillating dismissal and envy.
So as the latest New York Times critic to go spelunking in this city’s museums, galleries, studios and alternative spaces, from Brentwood to Boyle Heights, let me get my verdict out of the way fast. Is Los Angeles, in 2019, the equal of New York as a center for contemporary art? Sure, of course it is. …
