political clout of developers like Maguire, Broad and Shuwa (all major campaign donors to the mayor and the city council) ensures that municipal cultural policy maximally favors big Downtown or Westside projects, where on-site public art or adjacent museums inflate property values. The Community Development Agency’s vaunted ‘culture tax’ of one per cent on new development – intended to promote ‘the integration of the arts into all aspects of the built environment’148 – has largely functioned as a sleight-of-hand subsidy to Downtown developers, whose expenditures on monumental kinetic forms, sullen pastel plinths, and fascist steel cubes, are partially recompensed by reduced landleases or advantageous density transfers.
CATCHING UP WITH MANHATTAN
Century City
Moreover, the boom in public art and cultural monumentality has gone hand-in-hand with a culture depression in most of the inner city. As Linda Frye Burnham points out, the gleaming new museums and trendy Downtown loft district are a ‘Potemkin Village, so many facades hiding the fact that L.A. artists are in a desperate state, fighting over scraps, without career opportunities, funds or housing’.149 Since the late 1970s, school board financing for music and arts instruction has plummeted, key community arts workshops have closed, local jazz venues have folded one after another, Black dance has been shut out in the cold, community theater has withered, Black and Chicano filmmakers have lost much of their foundation support, and the world-famous East L.A. mural movement has almost disappeared. Such vital generators of community self-definition as the Watts Towers Arts Center, the Inner City Cultural Center, and the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have had to make drastic cutbacks to survive the ‘age of arts affluence’.150 The inner city, in other words, has been culturally hollowed out in lockstep with the pyramiding of public and private arts capital in Westwood and Bunker Hill. As a result Black and Chicano cultural avant gardes have either been decimated or forced to retreat from their community constituencies to the cooptative shelter of the universities and corporate arts establishment.151
The current Culture boom, and its attendant celebrity-intellectual influx, therefore, must be seen as an epiphenomenon of the larger social polarization that has revitalized Downtown and enriched the Westside at the expense of vast debilitated tracts of the inner city. Although Los Angeles now boasts of competing with New York’s culture worlds, it has none of the latter’s vast arts and literary patrimony, derived from successive radical bohemias and avant gardes. Even the expected ‘trickle-down’ from corporate culture largely fails to reach, or nurture, street culture in Los Angeles. As a result of a deliberate ‘deregionalization’ of cultural investment – symbolized by the 1979 decision to change the name of the future Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Contemporary Art (‘signifying that it would present art from an international rather than regional perspective’)152 – the arts fund is either spent on imported culture (especially from New York) or used to entice celebrity immigrants. The $35.2 million which the Getty family recently paid for a sixteenth-century work by the little-known painter Pontormo was many times the city’s annual budget for culture in Southcentral and East Los Angeles.
CULTURE SUPPORTING REAL ESTATE
Museum of Contemporary Art, Downtown
Given this conjuncture of arts bonanza and scorched earth, it is not surprising that imported intellectuals feel like missionaries in a cultural tabula rasa. Peter Sellars, the director of the corporate-endowed Los Angeles Festival (which has replaced the more populist Los Angeles Street Scene), is a modal example of the new mandarins who are ‘redefining’ the city. His curriculum vitae modestly relates that ‘in addition to the festival, he’s visiting professor in the World Arts and Cultures Department at UCLA, an artist in residence at Northwestern University, writing a book of essays on contemporary performance and preparing to launch into cinema as director of his first feature film’. Although ‘huge parts of the city are unformed and confusing’, Sellars loves Los Angeles because it is ‘the ground floor’, ‘a gawky adolescent . . . [full of] nascent energy’. ‘There is certainly that sense of genuine immaturity, but . . . I don’t think that’s entirely to be deplored – I think it’s interesting.’153
Such condescending enthusiasm has become the hallmark of the colon intelligentsia (Sellars has been in L.A. two years). Yet, at the same time, the arts elites, without any concession to the have-not cultural world, have begun to recognize the evident contradictions in their nouveau riche strategy (followed by all Sunbelt cities) of buying Culture straight off the rack of the world market. Over the last few years strenuous efforts have been made to discover seductive motifs that can act as brand labels for ‘culture made in L.A.’. As in the early 1900s when the Mission Revival helped dissimulate local class struggle, there is a many-sided effort to fashion a new, emollient ideology for ‘postmodern’ Los Angeles that emphasizes the glamorous upside of the current social polarization and stakes a claim for the city’s cultural leadership. In the absence of a single controlling metaphor like the ‘Mission’, however, the present mythmaking proceeds on several different tracks.
One track, represented by Sellars’s Los Angeles Festival and funded by Pacific Rim capital, aims to display Los Angeles as a bazaar of ethnic (although not necessarily indigenous) cultures. Since Los Angeles is the only city in the world whose ethnic diversity approaches or exceeds New York’s, (eighty-six different languages were recently counted amongst its school-children), multiculturalism seems an obvious emblem for its new globetrotting pretensions. Yet (so far) this is still largely an import strategy, focused on an emerging network of transactions between elite cultural institutions, and designed to pluralize the tastes of Los Angeles’s upscale arts consumers. As previously explained, it signifies no necessary commitment to the city’s own community arts centers or diverse street cultures, who generally lack the corporate support that endorses Japanese theater or European ballet. At its worst, ‘corporate multiculturalism’ is an attitude that patronizes imported diversity while ignoring its own backyard. Thus, when Black performers protested that their community was ‘virtually shut out’ of the 1987 Festival, they received the haughty reply ‘that the black community was represented in the multicultural program through foreign black artists, classical jazz performers and others’.154
Another major arts logo for 1990s Los Angeles is the deconstructed Pop architecture of Frank Gehry – heralded as the first major indigenous style since the bungalow. Gehry’s work has the peculiar quality of transmuting noir into Pop through a recycling of the elements of a decayed and polarized urban landscape (for example, rude concrete, chain-link, empty back walls, and so on) into light and airy expressions of a happy lifestyle (law schools, aquariums, movie libraries, etc.). It is a kind of architectural alchemy that makes the best of ‘bad urban spaces’, like downtown Hollywood or the Pico-Union barrio, by (as we shall see in chapter four) combining delightful geometrics with complex physical security systems. Not surprisingly Gehry, who has characterized some of his own proposals as ‘stage sets’, has struck up a lucrative relationship with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to design ‘entertainment architecture’ for the Disney World expansion in Florida as well as the Disney Concert Center on Bunker Hill.155 As the ‘human face’ of the corporate architecture that is transforming Los Angeles – uprooting neighborhoods and privatizing public space – Gehry has acquired a popular authority over regional taste that at times recalls the historic functions of Lummis, or even Disney.
The Los Angeles Festival’s sponsorship of ‘Pacific Rim consciousness’, along with Gehry’s gestures toward an architectural synthesis of ‘Los Angelesness’, have been mirrored by the combined efforts of planners, developers and business leaders to coin a ‘new urban archetype’ to emblematize the city’s official future. Under siege from angry homeowner and environmental groups protesting out-of-control development, and anxious to bolster his image for the 1986 gubernatorial race, Mayor Bradley established a corporate-dominated