The Arts In Los Angeles

Apollo Magazine has an interesting article on the growth of the art market in Los Angeles. The name of the article "Is LA’s art scene growing too quickly?" and discusses the growth of new private museums, gallery openings and working artists int he area. Below is a partial excerpt of the article, follow the source link for the full article.

As usual, ISA's annual conference always seems to be timely and with its finger on the pulse of the fine and decorative art markets, and the 2018 annual conference is being held March 9-12, 2018
The Westin Pasadena in Pasadena, California. Save the dates.

Apollo Magazine reports (follow the source link below for the full article)

Over 50 galleries opened in Los Angeles between 2013 and 2016, a number of them decently-funded satellites or plants with European or east-coast bases. Three sizeable private museums opened, or prepared to open, each comparable or bigger in square footage than LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Eli Broad, the third richest man in LA County and a collector who has had his hand in local arts institutions since the late 1970s, put his museum right across from MOCA on Grand Avenue in the centre of downtown. Broad, who refers to himself as a venture philanthropist and prefers that his investments make a profit, spent $140 million on the 120,000 square-foot building. He wanted it next to both MOCA, established in 1979, and Frank Gehry’s ambitious 2003 Disney Concert Hall, two buildings to which he donated substantially and then strongly influenced – ‘Eli’s middle name is “Strings Attached”’, said LA Times art critic Christopher Knight. Since the early 2000s, Broad argued that Grand Avenue could become the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles, insisting that his notoriously sprawling, centreless city should have a cultural thoroughfare just like Paris. Then in September 2015, two weeks before the Broad Museum opened, Broad adjusted his rhetoric. ‘At one point I misspoke and said that Grand Avenue was going to be the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles,’ he told the New York Times, ‘which may have been an exaggeration.’

Other private contemporary art museums are opening, their founders matching and even outstripping Broad’s ambition. When completed, the Main Museum, founded by real-estate mogul Tom Gilmore and his partner Jerri Perrone, will take up 100,000 square feet of former bank and office buildings at the corner of 4th and Main, just a few blocks west of Skid Row. Renderings by architect Tom Wiscombe show a black, futuristic, swirling protrusion on the façade. While construction continues, the raw, half-finished lobby of a bank building currently hosts an exhibition of Alice Konitz’s modular circle and triangle chairs, usable sculptures that invite engagement in a way that the Broad’s Jeff Koons’ sculptures and Andy Warhol’s paintings can’t.

Paul and Maurice Marciano, brothers and co-founders of Guess jeans, opened their museum on Wilshire in the middle of the city on 25 May. With the help of local architect Kulapat Yantrasast, who has a minimal aesthetic and an art-world following, the brothers renovated a 110,000 square-foot former Masonic temple. Many of its once lavish rooms, which fell into disrepair after the Masons moved out in 1994, are now white-walled exhibition spaces, though some colour remains (mosaic murals, for instance). The debut exhibition, curated by former MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser will, purportedly, bring ‘together an international, multigenerational roster of artists who are among contemporary art’s leading creative and critical voices’, though all of these ‘voices’ will be extracted from the 1,500 works the Marcianos already own. Blogger William Poundstone, after doing an informal inventory of the Marciano collection, concluded that it has significant overlap with the Broad. Both museums own versions of the same sculpture, a sterling silver anime Buddha by Japanese maverick Takashi Murakami, and different works by Alex Israel, an LA native who always wears sunglasses and mines SoCal clichés with a deadpan sense of entitlement.

Source: Apollo Magazine