Habits are hard to break. I quit smoking 40 years ago — on April 23, 1986 (not that I’m counting). It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.
Today is my final column for The Times. This habit has gone on even longer than the smoking one, which had been extra hard to give up because nicotine is an excellent aid to concentration when at the keyboard. I’ve been doing daily art journalism for 45 years — 36 of them at The Times, with 2,195 bylines — so I’m about to find out whether this quitting will also be hellish. I won’t stop writing, but the daily journalism thing is done.
Looking back, the transformation of the cultural life of Los Angeles during my journalism career has been extraordinary. When I started out, the size of the balkanized art community was small. Now it’s big. Or very big. A few signs of contraction have been glimpsed — a gallery closure here, a market slide there — but it won’t ever be small again. Sprawl is usually cast as an L.A. negative, but it was good for art. The horizontal city is just too big to fully gentrify; there was always another neighborhood where an artist could find studio space, or a gallery could open up shop. And they did.
It was daunting fun to write about, too, and I almost missed it.
In 1982 I was recruited by the New York Times to take the No. 2 spot on its influential art criticism desk. I didn’t want to go, given L.A.’s freewheeling art territory compared with imperial Manhattan. But for a journalist, being recruited by the New York Times is like being drafted: You don’t have much choice but to go. Happily for me, the executive editor at the time was notoriously homophobic, and when he learned that I was openly gay he put an immediate stop to the hire — just as my now-husband and I were about to sign an apartment lease.
“I don’t care if you sleep with elephants, but if you do, you won’t cover the circus for the New York Times,” the wretched editor was known to opine, in what he thought was a noble utterance of professional acumen, rather than ostentatious bigotry. Fine by me. I was happy to circus-watch in L.A.
Today, Los Angeles is firmly entrenched among the handful of most significant producers of new art in the world. At least three important factors made that happen.
First and foremost, the talent pool exploded.
Artists are always the drivers. Since the 1950s, key figures launched important genres, including hard-edge abstract painter John McLaughlin, harbinger of Light and Space perceptual art, and assemblage master Wallace Berman. The ‘60s and ‘70s saw a roster of major artists, too long to list here, overtake prominent art scenes in San Francisco and then Chicago, America’s so-called “second city” for art. But it was the ‘80s and ‘90s that witnessed art’s truly staggering expansion in the rich demographic diversity of L.A.
What happened?
Young artists emerging from Southern California’s bountiful art schools decided, en masse, to stick around. New York? Why move there?
The usual talent-drain to the East slowed, partly thanks to the extraordinarily gifted Mike Kelley. Artists always know who among their cohorts is the best, and even as a student at Cal Arts, where Kelley graduated in 1978, he held that influential position. After graduation he decided to buck the usual trend and stay in town. People noticed.
I was nonplussed at a 1992 symposium in Vienna when a hall filled with international art world denizens went absolutely wild, cheering and stomping when Kelley was introduced on a panel. The greeting was worthy of a rock star. I had never seen anything like it.
The art world had internationalized, fueled significantly by the ‘80s emergence of a heady art market — a bubble that would soon burst, then revive — and by the brilliant return to prominence of German artists. Kelley was hardly the only American to benefit, but he was the first L.A. artist whose developing reputation — locally, then nationally, finally internationally — was fully coincident with the developing maturity and resonance of his extraordinary art.
Second: the Getty. I know of no other city whose rise to international stature can trace its launch to an exact day — in this case, Feb. 28, 1982.
That’s when news broke of the $1.2 billion bequest by the late American oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, then regularly cited as the world’s richest person, to his peculiar vanity museum in Pacific Palisades. After six years of contentious legal wrangling, earlier estimates of the possible windfall had nearly doubled. A small, second-rate art outpost overlooking the Pacific was suddenly the most richly endowed museum on Earth.
Today the endowment number is more than $9.45 billion. Culturally, the inevitable expenditure of vast sums of money isn’t exactly what made the difference. Instead, the simple fact of massive media fascination with an art-related subject in Los Angeles did the trick.
Sure, international press had been fixated on the city for decades, but the focus was on Hollywood pop culture — movies, television, music. As 1982 unfolded, one could almost feel every news camera around the globe turn to L.A. For the first time, art culture, not popular culture, became a target of enduring media attention.
That had never happened before, except for a specific event like the 1922 arrival of Gainsborough’s famed “The Blue Boy,” as the world’s then-most expensive painting headed to Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino mansion, or the near-demolition in 1959 of Sabato Rodia’s incomparable Watts Towers. Since the Getty news, though, international art attention has been fixed.
The third transformation: A path-breaking art institution opened. Artists got an idea for a Museum of Contemporary Art off the ground in 1979, goading the wealthy and influential powers that be into action. MOCA had its public debut in 1983. It was not without its tribulations — either at the start or throughout its 46-year roller-coaster history. But an audacious museum expressly designed to present, collect, preserve and interpret the art of our time, as its mission statement declares, set a standard that has been emulated across the country and abroad.
From the adaptive reuse of an industrial-era building in Little Tokyo for the “Temporary Contemporary” — which became an instant template for countless other new museums, from Sydney’s MCA Australia to London’s Tate Modern — to a slew of landmark exhibitions unafraid to tackle art’s tangled contemporary history internationally since the end of World War II, MOCA emerged as the most talked about institution of its type in America. In 1992, the landmark “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the ‘90s” looked forward, not backward, inventing history. The city’s vivifying artistic production was put on the map.
Artists, mass media, infrastructure — the thriving triad was extraordinary to watch erupt.
Art is a mysterious experience, with an object or event as its catalyst. And because art is experience, it’s essential to be willing to change your mind as your experience unfolds. Art criticism is about writing, a fundamental way to process that mystery, aiming to discover something at least temporarily intelligible. The job of writing for a newspaper is to find ways to invite a reader, whether specialist or generalist, into that process of discovery — all while knowing that somewhere, out in the vast invisible readership, is someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do.
Every few years now there seems to be a flurry of worry about a “crisis in criticism.” I think that fuss misses the mark, however. The crisis is in publishing, not criticism.
There are different kinds of art criticism — theoretical, and academic, two that turn up in different kinds of scholarly journals; trade, sponsored in commercially supported magazines; and journalistic, embedded in press reporting on everyday life. Charles Baudelaire, 19th century poet, was journalistic criticism’s first great practitioner. His classic “The Painter of Modern Life,” advocating for upending art’s sclerotic monotony, appeared in three profoundly influential installments of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro.
Trade and journalistic art criticism are both rooted in mass media, now threatened as their platforms shrink and disappear. The Times has had a staff art critic for a hundred years, ever since the 1926 appointment of British immigrant and painter Arthur Millier, who wrote in these pages for 32 years. Modern American mass media exploded in the 1920s — notably, along with Hollywood. The crisis now in publishing (and Hollywood) is a function of the previous generation’s chaotic digital revolution, which fractured media’s old “mass.”
For criticism, streaming snippets are now carried along in a fragmentary rush of social media, bumping aside analog writing and reading. All too often, thumbs up-or-down stand in its place. Where that’s all headed is anybody’s guess, just as it was half a millennium ago, early in the Gutenberg revolution of print.
L.A.’s transformation might be most apparent in two events planned for next year, when the Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art both open. Most attention so far has focused on their unusual architecture, sure to draw crowds. But I’m on the record as skeptical of their planned programs. LACMA intends curator-heavy thematic installations of its permanent collections, although it doesn’t have the depth to present more than Art History Lite. Meanwhile, the Lucas idea confuses art culture with popular culture, bizarrely touting illustrated storytelling as “the peoples’ art.” As one of those people, I object.
Still, these tourist-driven projects add up to the L.A. debut for upward of $2 billion in new art museum infrastructure. Astonishing.
When I started in 1980, I wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible. But they rise atop an exhilarating foundation. I look forward to seeing them.
And here’s hoping we’ll read some discerning criticism on the subject as well.
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