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Tyler Green twits New York bloggers for not responding to these paragraphs from a Peter Plagens Los Angeles Times article:
L.A.'s contemporary art world is younger and hipper than New York's. [....] In L.A., the big competition seems to be among graduate-school studio programs rather than galleries; some students are scouted for gallery recruitment even before their master of fine arts theses shows have gone up. The ratio of big-time contemporary collector dollars to working young artists is greater in L.A. than anywhere else, including New York. Whenever I'm asked, I tell ambitious art students in the heartland to head west, not east, to try to get noticed.One West Coast blogger takes this as proof that L.A. has replaced NY as the center of the art world, something I wish I had a quarter for every time I'd read in an L.A. based publication. This business of evaluating a scene based on the energy of its graduate schools seems to me not very healthy, wherever the locale. The gauge should be not who produces the best work under faculty supervision but who stays with it over the years, and what they produce, rubbing shoulders with the largest number of fellow perserverers.
But many young L.A. artists also experience the career arcs of top models or fruit flies: about one season, if that. And nowhere in the country -- maybe the world -- is popular culture more expertly conceived, technologically amped, attractively packaged, and overwhelmingly pervasive -- even unto gallery art -- as in Southern California. A few weeks ago, I prowled around Otis College of Art and Design and thought that if they'd just present the sketchbooks and mock-ups from the toy design department as the fine arts theses shows, Santa Monica galleries would snap 'em up whole.
As for the alternative/rival/fellow traveler to New York in visual art--I believe that's Europe. An Atlantic (Euro-New York-Caribbean-African) vs Pacific (Cal-Asian) dialectic might be more interesting than the tired U.S. coastal rivalries.