Los Angeles and Artistic Vision

There's a lot of writing as of late about Los Angeles as the center of the cultural universe. These people aren't talking about just pop culture such as the possibility of Paris Hilton going to jail for DUI or Winona Ryder trying to make a comeback. Los Angeles has become the art mecca of the 21st century--where NY and everywhere else look to to see what's goin' on, so to speak. I can dig it, I get, and I've been gettin' it since I moved here in '97. Here are a few recent tidbits...



Werner Herzog (from this Esquire article)

Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States--cultural substance. There is a competition between New York and Los Angeles, but New York only consumes culture and borrows it from Europe. Things get done in Los Angeles.




Caryn Coleman (from this abLA article)

Sometimes I read articles on the art world and, in particular, Los Angeles that make me wonder if I'm living on a totally different art world planet than the people writing or quoted in the piece. Last week there were two such things that made me feel this way...

On Artforum.com's diary Painting the Town by Andrew Berardini, says:
Los Angeles loves to hate painters—whether homegrown or imported.Really???? I don't think I've ever had that conversation or if that opinion (if partially true) is strong enough in LA to make such a bold statement.

And then the New York Times had the article The Art’s Here. Where’s the Crowd? about LA art scene (downtown, the Hammer, you know the drill) and Gary Garrels is quoted as saying:
“The rest of the world is promoting the city as well or better than L.A. does,” said Gary Garrels, the chief curator at the Hammer Museum, who moved here two years ago from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “All of the curators and galleries that are dynamic are coming to Los Angeles and looking at what’s going on here.”Ok, so I'll admit that I actually do a bit more business with people on the east coast than in LA sometimes but I can't imagine that the rest of the world is promoting LA as much as LA is let alone more. I mean, even this NYT article is about a year after the fact.