Arts Journalism Summit 2013

RECENTLY I went to the Annenberg Beach House -- the same spot on which William Randolph Hearst once built a 110-room love nest for his affairs with Marion Davies -- to try to figure out the future of cultural journalism. This summit on the crisis of the arts press was put together by the Getty and USC folks.

On that cloudy day in Santa Monica, the Getty's arts fellows -- a very sharp bunch -- from the US and UK spoke and argued with some local artists and arts leaders, media scholars, tech-kids and foundation types. Some fascinating conversation, some depressing, some encouraging.

I wrote two essays on how the whole thing worked out. In the first, "A Day Full of Questions," tried to document the day's debates as accurately as I could. The second piece, "Some Unanswered Questions," looks at the issues that didn't come up, or didn't seem substantially resolved. (In the first piece, perhaps, I am playing reporter, in the second, a critic.) That one concludes with what ended up being an intriguing dinner at director Peter Sellars' house.

For anyone with an interest in these things, I encourage you to take a good look at the rest of the site, which Doug McLennan, the ArtsJournal.com founder who put it together, calls a virtual summit. There's a lot of spark and intelligence on the site, though no easy answers.

Modern Architecture in LA

WHEN people think about LA urbanism, they still invoke the same old cliches -- Woody Allen's line about the only "cultural advantage" being a right turn on red, the notorious "sprawl," and so on. They recite Getrude Stein's line about "no there there" (applied originally to another California city) as if the early town fathers just sort of forgot that part.

So it was refreshing to hear from two Getty curators, who I spoke to last week about the place's new architecture initiative, that the sins and glories of LA were all pretty much planned out a century ago.

(I got very pumped up talking these guys about our bold, unconventional metropolis -- and then as I got on the 405, realized what an absolute disaster LA can be sometimes.) 

Here is my LA Times piece on the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture, and the inaugural show, Overdrive. (There will be a lot in the press on this over the next few months.) It is a sequel of sorts to its (much larger) initiative on postwar art in L.A.

The first press conference was at the Capitol Records tower, and the Getty seems to be rolling this out in style. What I wonder is, with all the work done on LA modernism -- by everyone from the Conservancy's Modern Committee to DnA radio host Frances Anderson to architectural historian Alan Hess -- can the Getty, which spent years basically ignoring LA and contemporary culture, add anything to the continuing story?

Looking forward to finding the answer to that question over the ensuing weeks and months.

Introducing Pacific Standard Time

IT'S finally happened. After a lot of talk, the postwar art blowout Pacific Standard Time has opened at dozens of museums and spaces across Southern California.

Your humble blogger wrote a piece for Los Angeles magazine about the origins, offerings and meaning of the whole thing -- it includes a dozen recommended shows, from the Getty's overview, Crosscurrents, to a show of swimming pool photography in Palm Springs. Here's an image that describes what I liked about this period:

Walter Hopps, the curator-genius who steered the gallery in its radical early days, originally supported his art habit by working as a psych-ward orderly. Kienholz lived, as he put it, “on the fringes of society, like a termite,” so poor that he bartered a painting for the removal of an aching tooth. Irwin made his money winning dance contests—the lindy mostly—and betting on horses. Billy Al Bengston was so broke that he couldn’t afford a battery for his car: The art school dropout parked his ’37 Pontiac facing downhill, nose toward the Malibu surf, so he could roll-start it.


Here's something art critic Dave Hickey just told the New York Times:

Wildman Ed Kienholz

“It’s corny,” said Dave Hickey, an art critic and a professor in the art and art history department at the University of New Mexico. “It’s the sort of thing that Denver would do. They would do Mountain Standard Time. It is ’50s boosterish, and I would argue largely unnecessary.”


You be the judge.

Pacific Standard Time's Life and Times

WE'RE getting close to the launch of a gargantuan art blowout -- much bigger than an exhibit, not as cheesy as a "celebration" -- called Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945 to 1980. This will be a six month initiative involving museums and galleries from Santa Barbara to San Diego, Santa Monica to Palm Springs.

For Sunday's LA Times I put together a timeline intended to be helpful in orienting interested parties. I hope it's a good read too and tells part of the story of this remarkable state. The chronology -- HERE -- tracks things from the work of Salvador Dali's (right) with Hitchcock, through Ed Ruscha and the Ferus Gallery and the Watts Towers (above), up to the presidential election of Ronald Reagan.

I'll be writing more about Pacific Standard Time: Please stay tuned.