Los Angeles is an arts city. You can see it in the movie and TV advertisements that plaster buses, buildings, and billboards along the highway, as well as the dizzying number of (mostly contemporary) art museums. Los Angeles is also a driving city. All Californian cities are, but Los Angeles is the most egregious. Its highways aggressively partition the city and hungrily knot each other like living entities. What else would explain the “the” attached before the 405 or the 110?
Contained in the artistic and motoristic identity of the city is a poignant voyeurism: inherent in film and TV, and indulged in through rubbernecking. The city makes you complacent with a voyeurism that is impossible to fight. To reject voyeurism is, in the end, to perform it: one must first voyeur the voyeurs to disavow them, for the ultimate purpose of the voyeurs to voyeur the rejection of their voyeurism. To staunchly reject the norm demonstrates a deep familiarity with it. Any rejected paradigm will still be at the heart of its replacement. Let me explain.
When I went to The Broad, one of Los Angeles’s newer museums, I rolled my eyes at young adults taking pictures in front of the sculptures and paintings. Disgusted, at not just the commodification of art in the minds of these youths, but in the minds of The Broad’s collectors (how else can you have such a large collection of Jeff Koons and make patrons exit through the gift shop), I realized that my inspection of the artwork labels, painstaking notice of paint strokes, and ambivalence to capture photos was not entirely un-performative. In being unable to communicate with the visitors and collectors, I performed my criticism and wanted them to see, what? That I was better?
Where I felt dizzyingly superior in The Broad, I felt maddeningly small at the MOCA across the street. The Michael Asher exhibit laughably admitted to its own voyeur driven materialism: the nature of Asher’s site-specific works meant they weren’t meant to be preserved or removed from their original context. And yet, my laughing at this contradiction was only to console the fact that I, a visual arts major knowledgeable of the contemporary art landscape and its history, could not understand the exhibition or its appeal. Of course The Broad across the street had a line out the door, while a single footstep at the MOCA echoed through the building.
On the same block, Los Angeles displays galleries of hollow commodity and intellectual abstraction with no in-between, an alarming gulf not only for contemporary art, but also for modern culture. While this seems to split the hairs of conscientious, middle-ground viewers, it only solidifies the identity of the museums that create this polarization, identity that is increasingly becoming an “art” not just for institutions but individuals.
As I walked down Santa Monica Beach in the scorching heat, I observed a young man in a full black suit mouthing the words of something unheard, checking and changing angles time and time again. Voyeurism became an ouroboros. People make spectacles of themselves, not just for others but for their own self-voyeurism. To feel, what? Unique? But an actor in a cast of actors becomes an extra, a bright mind in a school of bright minds becomes an average, an artist in a city of artists becomes…
Los Angeles, the funhouse of mirrors, laughs from no discernable point in space. This is why Los Angeles is the arts city. While its peculiar quirks, competitive film programs, and vast art collections add to the sparks that light fires in artists’ brains, the best spark for an art work remains a question.
Image: Kamal-ol-Molk, Mirror Hall, oil on canvas, 1876 (Golestan Palace, Tehran).