Q. What's the difference between Los Angeles and a bowl of yogurt?
A. Yogurt has a live culture.
Time to pension off that oldie, at least where the visual arts are concerned. The '80s have been growth years for new museums across America, and nowhere more so than in Los Angeles. The end of 1986 saw a variety of art institutions either up or growing amid the sprawl of freeways. The most newsy, which opened early in December to a white glare of publicity faintly shaded with apprehension, is the Museum of Contemporary Art, known by its acronym MOCA. It was closely preceded by the $35 million Robert O. Anderson building, a new wing intended to see the city's chief museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, for short), into the 21st century.
In the background of all this was the quiet, planetary bulk of the J. Paul Getty Trust, endowed with an astronomical $2.8 billion for running five main entities: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Art History Information Program, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and the Conservation Institute. The Getty trust Los Angeles headquarters, to be designed by Architect Richard Meier, is bound to shift the balance of art scholarship throughout the world, turning Los Angeles into one of its indispensable centers. More than any single museum, the Getty will alter the West Coast's sense of cultural identity.
There are good reasons why the growth of American museums has reached this temporary peak in Los Angeles. It is the second biggest city in the U.S., and determined to make itself felt. It teems with new money thirsting for status through art. In Los Angeles, city of therapies, one sees the great American illusion that art is socially therapeutic brought to its apex. Medicean longings inflate the breast of the lowliest junk-bond zillionaire. Whole busloads of fledgling collectors shuttle on regular tours, shepherded by docents, art-investment consultants and "educators" of every stamp, among the private collections of Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Malibu. What other commodity offers such a blend of transcendence and fiscal display? Buying is a spectator sport, and the art gallery the Nautilus center of the soul. But in Movieland, the heat of egotism creates a desire for equal screen credit. Where else would a museum herald a show of Picasso sculptures, as LACMA did a couple of years ago, with a crimson banner on its facade: THE WOLPER PICASSOS, as though the schlockmeister of the Statue of Liberty had helped make them by buying them?
El Lay, La-La Land -- this part of the West Coast, as its nicknames imply, has long been stuck with the reputation of a cultural slide area where not much is deep, permanent or altogether serious. This is the price of being the world's fantasy mill. Its origins lie in the fierce distrust of popular culture (which Los Angeles epitomizes) among New York City intellectuals of the '40s and '50s. In fact, one can make a most impressive list of contemporary Los Angeles artists, from Richard Diebenkorn to the young < sculptor Mark Lere. But what the city lacked was the sense of layering, of patronage and museum policy, of critical argument and institutional depth.