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" There&amp;#039;s a moment in the life of every family when the dynamic of power shifts\u2014not all the power, just enough of it to change the world forever. A younger child grows one measure more, and suddenly none of the long-standing truths about who&amp;#039;s stronger or smarter or most attractive fits the facts. The shift isn&amp;#039;t immediate; the old roles have their comforts, and the new ones come with responsibilities. But for a while, before things settle into the next status quo, everything feels secret and exciting; a development decades in the making feels as if it has just been invented. That&amp;#039;s how it is right now in the L.A. art scene, which has gained a suddenly perceptible edge on its East Coast rival. &amp;quot;In some people&amp;#039;s minds L.A. has surpassed New York,&amp;quot; says local legend John Baldessari. &amp;quot;Some years back there was an exhibition of L.A. art at the Pompidou in Paris [the 2006 show &amp;quot;Los Angeles, 1955\u20131985: The Birth of an Art Capital&amp;quot;], and the organizer said, &amp;#039;Art in New York is finished. It&amp;#039;s only coming out of L.A.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Baldessari has a longtime teacher&amp;#039;s gift for starting a fight and then getting nimbly out of the way. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t share that view,&amp;quot; he says wryly. &amp;quot;But some people do.&amp;quot; The photographer Catherine Opie, who studied at CalArts and is now a professor at UCLA, points to the &amp;quot;Pacific Standard Time&amp;quot; series of exhibitions initiated by the Getty in 2011\u2014more than 60 museums, galleries, and universities collaborating on a head-to-toe survey of L.A. art from 1945 to 1980\u2014as the moment the rest of the world started paying attention. &amp;quot;In terms of celebrity life, Hollywood has always had it locked up out here,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not stars of the culture,&amp;quot; and that nearly anonymous status, she says, has helped contribute to the great generosity she has experienced among artists, free of the competitiveness of New York, as well as to the freedom to experiment. Nevertheless, after the PST shows she felt a change. Now celebrities tend to introduce themselves to her: &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Oh, you&amp;#039;re Catherine Opie, the artist,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s still kind of surprising that they know who you are.&amp;quot; The story is not as simple as the muscular rise of L.A. or the putative decline of New York. In the past six years the art market has changed irretrievably along with the rest of the winner-take-all global economy. A movable feast of art fairs and biennales in Basel, Hong Kong, Venice, and Miami has diminished the gatekeeper status of the local gallery scenes in New York, London, and Paris. Auction houses have taken the lead in cultivating a new international clientele, driving the prices for trophy pieces of contemporary art to new records. Art can be treated as if it were any other investment, with spreadsheets tracking risk factors, carrying costs, equalized rates of return. L.A.&amp;#039;s rise has both coincided with and acted as a contrast to the growing homogenization of the global art market. For one thing, artists can still afford to live in many parts of the city. &amp;quot;The balance of money and creativity in New York has become a little skewed,&amp;quot; says Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, a former New Yorker who calls herself an Angeleno now. &amp;quot;New York is more a commercial center for art. L.A. has become more a place where art is made. The city is like a collection of individual satellite communities with clusters of creativity. Whether it&amp;#039;s Baldessari and Ed Ruscha and the guys of their generation in Venice, Libros Schmibros in Boyle Heights, the galleries in Culver City and downtown, the even newer ones popping up in Hollywood and on Mission Road, or artist enclaves like Highland Park, L.A. is home to a staggering variety of cultural production, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world right now.&amp;quot; That the city is being taken seriously after so long is a little puzzling. New York has always been run by finance and real estate\u2014anathema to most artists, at least on their way up. But the chief industry here depends on a steady supply of creativity, and the local gentry have always been artists: writers, musicians, directors, and produc- ers. What has changed is that the blurring of high art and low art\u2014a distinction few people here lose sleep over\u2014has somehow created the perfect petri dish for the current boom: an invigorating lack of pretension. As a result, says Michael Govan, CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)\u2014and another New York transplant\u2014&amp;quot;L.A. culture is non-hierarchical and forward-thinking.&amp;quot; Perhaps anticipating the arguments of his East Coast friends, he adds, &amp;quot;Although it feels a century younger, which it is, there is at least as much diversity and intensity here as in New York City, spread over a few thousand miles.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was living in Paris before I moved here,&amp;quot; says painter Rosson Crow, who is originally from Texas and therefore finds comfort in L.A.&amp;#039;s geographic sprawl. &amp;quot;I loved Paris with all its beauty and history, but I realized I was more interested in living someplace that was about the construction and reconstruction of history, and Los Angeles is the world capital of that.&amp;quot; Crow is part of a new generation that Baldessari describes as less intimidated and therefore more likely to take risks\u2014&amp;quot;not necessarily because they&amp;#039;re wiser, but because they&amp;#039;re not as immersed in art history,&amp;quot; he says. And there is an equally fresh generation of gallery owners and dealers, like Hannah Hoffman, who followed the lead of L.A. gallery pioneer Shaun Regen and opened a place one block south of Regen Projects in Hollywood. Hoffman prefers L.A. as a venue for showing art now because it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;more open to self-definition. There are fewer rules, fewer prec- edents, and less consensus.&amp;quot; Her fellow gallerist Michelle Papillion agrees, with one reservation. &amp;quot;People who don&amp;#039;t live here love to say that we have no culture. I think they&amp;#039;re just lazy visitors. Los Angeles is now a melting pot for a very eclectic and diverse artistic scene.&amp;quot; One factor that nearly everyone cites as a key advantage over New York is also the most clich\u00E9d: the reliability of sunshine. &amp;quot;I think the allure has always been the climate,&amp;quot; Baldessari says. &amp;quot;And that stays pretty constant.&amp;quot; For Franklin Sirmans, chief curator of contemporary art at LACMA, this is a practical consideration: The weather is so consistently favorable that the museum can plan activities outdoors with confidence, effectively multiplying its usable exhibition space. Balmy temperatures, of course, don&amp;#039;t make it any easier to be an artist. &amp;quot;The weather makes it hard to live anywhere else,&amp;quot; Papillion says. &amp;quot;But wherever you are, you have to work.&amp;quot; And, says Baldessari, who has no shortage of testy opinions, &amp;quot;the architecture is still ugly here.&amp;quot; Above: Baldessari, wearing a jacket by his preferred designer, Saint Laurent by Heidi Slimane ($2,450).  Read more of our L.A. portfolio here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/reviews/a1634/los-angeles-portfolio-art/>