MOCA's "Art in the Streets"

THE other day I belatedly made it over to the Museum of Contemporary Art for its celebrated -- and blockbuster -- Art in the Streets show. I can't remember longer lines for a museum show; maybe Murakami or something.

Overall, this seemed to me a strong and engaging show. If anything it was perhaps too large and complete, in its commandeering of the entire Geffen Contemporary space and aiming to tell the history of graffiti, skateboard culture, tagging, hip hop and related phenomenon from the early '70s to the present. (As you'd hope from a show at a Los Angeles museum, the West Coast was not entirely overlooked, as it sometimes is in histories of contemporary art. But see below.)

The volume at times was overwhelming, with some parts verging on theme park, but mostly this was a well balanced and at times exciting show. I especially enjoyed the display of schooled artists inspired by street art -- the Juxtapoz crowd -- which included Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen. (Two of California's greatest artists of my generation; LACMA, during an earlier regime, both commissioned and later destroyed some of their work.)

So with all this popular, rad, exuberant and accessible street art, why do I feel a bit uneasy about the whole thing? Part of it is that I'm smelling the acrid scene of hype. LA Times critic Christopher Knight got at some of my misgivings in an provocative essay that I fear will be overlooked because of its appearance on Memorial Day weekend.

His Sunday essay argues that MOCA's claims that street art is "the most influential art movement since Pop" is "overblown." Here's Knight: 

"Art in the Streets" cites global reach, including London; São Paolo, Brazil; Athens; and Tokyo, as evidence. (Sixty artists are surveyed.) Since the 1970s, however, the deepest impact on art culture has come from Conceptual art, not graffiti.

Conceptualism is the primary lingua franca of art today — like it or not, and for good or ill. 

Knight has other problems with the show, including some artists he considers overlooked (I wrote about LA artist Gajin Fujita here) and an issue familiar to West Coast culture vultures:

Mostly MOCA tells a mythic tale in which graffiti, an Expressionist art form, is largely born in Manhattan, spreads across the country and finally envelopes the world. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it replays New York School legend, long since discredited, about Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1940s. 

Another sour note: We've all been complaining for years that museums build their exhibits around their gift shops; British street artist Banksy even has a film called Exit Through the Gift Shop. 

But this may be the first show I've seen in a long time -- and I've been going to big exhibits in London, New York, D.C. and LA for more than 20 years -- where you are basically forbidden to go into the gift shop. At least, that's the way it seemed when my wife and son walked into the museum store and I, lagging along by a few feet so I could reed a wall label, was kept out because the shop had reached capacity. Soon a substantial line had built up, and the museum lost both my loyalty and the $20 or $30 I might have spent on a book. (If the guard had been less rude it would have pissed me off less.)

In conclusion, despite some mixed feelings about the genre and the exhibit itself, this show did a lot to win me over. Knight excepted, I don't seem to be alone here. My four-year-old son -- who is by now all too familiar with museum shows -- reclined on the bean-bag chairs in the theater showing Spike Jonze's inventive skateboard videos and offered, "Dis is da life!!"

And who can argue with that?

MOCA and Postwar Art

NOT long ago I snuck over to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the exhibit of its permanent collection. Am I crazy, or is this - dedicated to the years from 1940 to '80 -- one of LA's best shows of postwar art in the last few years?

The exhibit, of course, comes at a time when MOCA has just survived a major financial crisis that led to the resignation of its longtime director. Now, in the period right before the post is assumed by the New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, a show dedicated to the museum's permanent collection could just be a place holder -- or like being invited to a dinner party and served leftovers. But it's an eye-opening tour of the first few decades in which the U.S. -- and the West Coast in particular -- became an important capital of  contemporary art.

What I liked about the show is that besides a few obligatory pieces -- a Pollock drip painting, familiar Diane Arbus photos -- it's full of pieces that even a frequent museum-goer will not be sick of. Part of this is because of a leaning toward West Coast artists -- Diebenkorn, Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Wallace Berman -- who are rarely overexposed ever in West Coast museums.

But I won't lean too hard on California defensiveness here -- this show is catholic and intriguing no matter what one's geographic or generational orientation. My wife particularly likes the Adrian Piper piece, which was a bit hermetic for my taste, but I was glad to catch a sample of the artist's work.

(The only downside of the visit was that my favorite downtown eatery, the beer-and-sausages joint called Wurstkuche, was so entirely packed we had to move to a (perfect decent) Japanese place down the street.)

The show I took in is up in the museum's main space, on California Plaza, across from Disney Hall; I think it may move out of that space in April. I'm looking forward to returning to see the second half of the permanent collection, of work from the '80s to the present, in the more expansive Geffen Contemporary space.