There’s a lot of talk these days about how Los Angeles is changing — how it’s starting to look and act like New York. Eli Broad, at Wednesday’s press preview of his eponymous Museum in downtown L.A., seemed to go even even further. “This is the cultural capital of the world,” Broad proclaimed, usurping for Los Angeles a title that New Yorkers are accustomed to claiming for their own town.
Natives of the Big Apple may be inclined to dispute the equivalence, let alone the preeminence of Los Angeles, in this sphere. Yet the scene at Thursday evening’s inaugural reception for the Broad Museum looked an awful lot like an East Coast gala of comparable pomp and circumstance. For starters, nearly everyone wore black, or some other somber tone. Over cocktails, guests in formal attire of the first order discussed the Broad’s new Diller Scofidio + Renfro building, located along a prime stretch of Grand Avenue across from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, their chatter overlaying the rustle of tulle and crinoline of ball gown trying, to no avail, to rival the architecture. Not everyone hewed to the dress code, of course. John Baldessari, who evidently has the creative license to interpret the black tie however he sees fit, sported khaki fatigues. And inside the museum, where attendees mingled ahead of the evening’s celebratory dinner, New York City art dealer Dominique Levy navigated the sea of navy blue and gray in the night’s most impressive costume: a neon-green frock that shone almost as brightly as the Ellsworth Kelly paintings hanging nearby — some of which may well have been acquired through her channels.
Whatever their similarities, New York will have to admit L.A. superiority in one crucial category: celebrities. They flocked to the rapidly developing Bunker Hill neighborhood, where Eli and Edythe Broad’s new institution is seen as a crucible for urban regeneration. Owen Wilson was there, as were a lot of other vaguely familiar faces that I can’t put a name to. In a curiously poignant moment, Gwenyth Paltrow greeted Toby Maguire and Jennifer Meyer in front of Thomas Struth’s museum photographs. Their enthusiasm provided a stark contrast to Struth’s stupefied art viewers and offered a reminder that spectacle comes in many varieties. There’s plenty in the art business, of course — and New York galleries opening a slew of high-profile outposts on the West Coast are fast making inroads in the cultural life of Los Angeles — but in Hollywood, there’s no business like show business.
