You just never know where genius may lurk. Chances are, however, that the next Matthew Barney or Damien Hirst is likely to turn up in Los Angeles. Good weather, affordable workspace, a thriving creative community and a palpable sense of promise make L.A. a favorite destination.
``That's kind of why I'm here,'' says Michael Govan, who left the Dia Art Foundation in New York last year to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). ``That openness.''
During a recent visit, I found a rapidly expanding, sociable art scene whose variety and informality make a striking contrast with the competitive, fashion-driven and market- dominated art world of New York.
From gallery enclaves in Chinatown and the mid-Wilshire district to Santa Monica and Culver City (L.A.'s most Chelsea- like neighborhood), prices -- and expectations -- generally run lower than in New York, with work by both emerging and mid- career artists selling for well under $10,000.
In L.A., galleries form a kind of cultural underground, operating in the shadow of an entertainment industry that is just beginning to pay them notice.
Mainstream museums, on the other hand, are actively engaged in promoting local talent, introducing new work by young artists before it ever appears in a gallery. At the moment, both UCLA's Hammer Museum and L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art are presenting exhibitions devoted to Los Angeles-based artists.
Broad's Museum
And when the new, Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum opens late this year on the Lacma campus, it will transform a dowdy public institution into a world-class destination.
Los Angeles has long been an incubator for artists, thanks to a concentration of top-flight schools boasting tenured faculties with enough clout to help forge new careers. They include such widely regarded figures as John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger and Cathy Opie.
According to Russell Ferguson, who chairs UCLA's Department of Art, graduating students used to go straight to New York. Now the majority stick around.
``It's not just that more artists are staying,'' Kruger says. ``It's also that more artists are moving here from New York.''
Open-house exhibitions by master's degree candidates regularly attract collectors with open wallets and dealers interested in developing new markets. Only two years after graduating from UCLA, 32-year-old Elliott Hundley recently made his New York solo debut at Andrea Rosen's blue-chip gallery in Chelsea. But his first public appearance was in a project show at the Hammer.
It can work the other way, too.
Common Themes
Ari Wiseman, assistant director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, chose the figurative sculpture and drawings of 35-year-old Matthew Monahan to exhibit this summer in the museum's MoCA Focus series, a three-year-old program devoted to emerging local artists. (Alexandra Grant and Florian Maier- Aichen are the others on view.)
Ironically, Monahan has no gallery in L.A. Wiseman discovered him at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
``Matthew didn't come through L.A. schools,'' Wiseman says. ``He moved here for personal reasons. It's only been in the last year that collectors started circling around him.''
Yet it is the art schools that make it possible for artist communities to form in such a sprawling metropolis.
``There are definitely cohorts of people who go through the MFA programs here and stay together,'' Ferguson says. ``Even those who leave for other places stay in touch.''
Three Generations
``Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists'' at the Hammer establishes a lineage of influence among three generations of local artists, drawing out common sensibilities and thematic associations that seem to have grown directly from the surrounding environment and culture.
Works on display date from the past 10 years and range from the amorphous ceramic blobs of Ken Price to ``paintings'' by Mark Bradford made from scraped and sanded billboards, and an almost slapstick, 24-hour video tour of L.A. by two young female collaborators, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn.
Organized by chief curator Gary Garrels (a recent transplant from New York's Museum of Modern Art), what the show identifies as typically L.A. art involves a particular attention to labor-intensive detail, a florid sensuality, dreamlike imagery that borders on the hallucinogenic or surreal, and an emphasis on collage.
Fresh and Exciting
In the galleries, new art runs from sophisticated to slipshod, but it is often energetic, rather than East Coast entropic, and is presented with a refreshing lack of pretense.
``You have a gallery in L.A. because you want to experiment,'' says Tara Sandroni, a partner in Sandroni.Rey in Culver City, an area of former motion-picture studio warehouses that has seen an explosion of new galleries -- at least 25 opened in the past couple of years.
``It's about the quality of the work and a point of view that's fresh and exciting,'' Sandroni adds. ``That's why we got into this business, and I hope we don't have to change.''
Daniel Hug, a dealer who lives above his small Chinatown shop, seems to operate it more as a showcase for the new rather than a showroom for the salable. ``It's less that I recognize good art than I recognize really bad art,'' he says. ``So what I show is the result of a process of elimination.''
``Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists'' is on view through Sept. 2 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., at Westwood Boulevard. Information: +1-310-443-7000 or http://www.hammer.ucla.edu .
The ``MoCA Focus'' series continues through Aug. 13 with Alexandra Grant, through Sept. 30 with Florian Maier-Atchen and through Oct. 28 with Matthew Monahan, all at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Information: +1-213-626-6222 or http://www.moca.org .
(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this story: Linda Yablonsky at fabyab@earthlink.net .
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