Los Angeles has always competed with New York City for the position as the U.S. cultural mecca of the arts.
We certainly have the architecture (the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Getty Center for example), and now much of the architecture being seen downtown is being inspired by the latest fashion. But Los Angeles just hasn’t been able to keep up with New York City in the realm of the visual arts. The likely confirmation of Olga Garay to the position of general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs isn’t likely to change this.
According to an article in the April 17 issue of The New York Times, Garay’s main goal as the cultural commissioner of Los Angeles is to “connect the dots” between all the different art venues in Los Angeles. If anything needs to be done, the dots need to be erased.
Several Los Angeles museums simply emulate each other, recycling the same artists and genres instead of trying to give art aficionados a variety of themes and art movements. The recent “WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution” exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) had tons of local museums around the L.A. County and Orange County, trying to replicate the success of “WACK!” Several of the different galleries highlighted prominent female artists and those who were active in the second wave of feminism in the ’70s.
Small galleries too often try to reproduce the success of the better-endowed, large museums, often highlighting a single artist from an exhibit at a bigger museum.
Vija Celmins, an artist briefly featured at the Los Angeles County of Muesum of Art’s incredibly successful “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images,” had an exhibit near the close of the “Magritte” exhibit at the Hammer Museum up the street.
While giving these different points of view a voice, the redundancies make the messages trite. Part of what makes art revolutionary, socially conscientious or in any way compelling is, in part, its shock value.
In Dada, artists tried to shock their audiences with graphic representations of the inhumanity people around the world suffered in a post-World War I society. In Impressionism, artists were revolutionary in their technique of painting outdoors and were seen during their time as garish. When looking at an abstract piece postmodernist art, viewers are supposed to see some kind of deep philosophical commentary on society.
When constantly surrounded by the same kind of art, though, these messages are lost. Or, at the very least, the variety of ideas and the characteristics that make these art movements unique become banal.
But variety does live in Los Angeles. Small galleries abound around the L.A. area and very seldom contain the repetitive themes that seem to abound throughout the larger museums. Hopefully, Garay won’t change the small galleries around Los Angeles and try to “connect the dots.” It defies the purpose that art is created to serve in the first place – to be innovative and thought-provoking.
