ART IN L.A.

With its sprawling landscape and diverse cultural strata, Los Angeles has long proved to be a dynamic and enigmatic urban center. It is no surprise, then, that its art should be similarly compelling and difficult to pin down. For a city that has played home to both the highest echelons of popular culture and the wildest sects of the underground, art runs rife with contradiction, unexpected combinations, and abundant references to contemporary culture, high and low. The ways that Los Angeles’s art is presented and experienced are no different; the city’s world-class museums are easily interchangeable with abandoned storefronts and transient gallery spaces. 

 

Whether they choose Hollywood celebrities or surfers and skaters in Venice Beach, tanning salons or hot rods, artists in L.A. are afforded a rich cultural vocabulary with which to work and an environment that accommodates an irreproducible amalgam of those influences. A strong Mexican immigrant population has affected a powerful history of Chicano art while subcultures that embrace graffiti, body art, and comix have dovetailed to produce the movement that is alternately classified as “Lowbrow” and “Pop surrealism.” Other artists have attempted to escape this cultural clutter entirely by embracing the isolation provided by their city, giving up on being hip, and embarking on more personal, emotional projects, prompting critics to coin the term “Post-cool.” Across the board, art in L.A. is hugely shaped by the city itself; boundaries are vague and perpetually changing, culture is widely available to accept, reject and rework, and nearly anything goes.