City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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for the renewal of that neighborhood, and as a counterweight to the westward drift of cultural life. Direct public financing of the proposed opera house, however, was defeated in the 1951 municipal election, and again in 1953, despite the appendage of a sports arena for the masses. This led GLAPI to switch to a public-private financing strategy and to replace the opera proposal with the idea of an omnibus ‘music center’. The leadership of the fundraising drive (coordinated with simultaneous initiatives to clear Bunker Hill and build Dodger Stadium) passed in the 1950s to Dorothy (‘Buffy’) Chandler, wife of the Times publisher, mother-in-law of ‘Missy’, and empress of the paper’s society page.
In a fascinating reconstruction of the Times’s role in the politics of culture in postwar Los Angeles, Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt explain how Buffy, to the consternation of the anti-semitic old guard, ‘crossed over’ to the Westside to find allies for the music center amongst the Jewish Hillcrest Country Club elite.139 Her masterstroke was to manipulate the bitter rivalry between the savings-and-loan nouveaux riches, Mark Taper and Howard Ahmanson, so as to extract the decisive donations that allowed the Music Center – with its Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theater – to finally open in 1964, alongside of the final evictions from Bunker Hill. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the renaissance of Downtown property values and the arrival of high culture in Los Angeles were meant to go hand in hand.140
But, as if to precisely counterbalance the Music Center’s pretensions to anchor Culture securely in Downtown, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, heavily endowed by the Ahmansons and other Westside patrons, opened a few months later in the Jewish Hancock Park area. Since the late 1940s the Westside had been staking claims for a distinctive cultural identity beyond mere affinity with Hollywood. Arts and Architecture magazine, which organized the postwar case-study homes project, crusaded for the International Style amongst affluent Westsiders with the same zeal that Land of Sunshine had once advocated the Mission Revival. Indeed, John Entenza, Arts and Architecture’s editor/publisher (1940–62), was transfixed with a Miesian vision of Wilshire Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills every bit as compelling as Lummis’s Craftsman ideal of the Arroyo and Pasadena. From his case-study home in Santa Monica Canyon (the Westside’s El Alisal), Entenza presided over a latter-day salon that included such important local design pundits as Peter Krasnow, Charles Eames and Alvin Lustig. Any perusal of Arts and Architecture’s 1950s files reveals the extent to which architectural and design Modernism became emblematic of a Westside cultural divide separating new money from old, Jew from Gentile, transplanted New Yorker from hereditary Pasadenan.
In this period of crosstown Kulturkampf, while Joan Didion was distilling her most dyspeptic imagery, a visiting British design historian, Reyner Banham, was penning the first serious celebration of the city since the booster days of the 1920s. Chief ideologue of the 1950s British ‘Independent Group’ – the midwife to the Pop Art explosion of the 1960s – Banham had once defined Pop as a ‘firing squad without mercy or reprieve’ against hieratic art traditions.141 From this perspective, Southern California, with its aggressive Present-mindedness, was a land purified by an exemplary design terror.142 Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (1971) found virtue in almost everything disdained by traditional critics, including the automobile,143 surfboards, hillside homes, and something called ‘Los Angeles architecture’. Rejecting the Exiles’ criterion of comparability with ‘classical’ urban space, Banham claimed that Los Angeles’s polymorphous landscapes and architectures were given a ‘comprehensible unity’ by the freeway grid in a metropolis that spoke the ‘language of movement, not monument’. He found the city’s ‘essential dream’ – ‘the dream of the urban homestead . . . the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside’ – a ‘sympathetic ecology for architecture’ and excoriated the elitism of critics who failed to consult the actual desires of the masses. Lest anyone mistake the punchline of his book, Banham also made a companion BBC television documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972).
The effect of Banham’s intervention was quite extraordinary. Supported by his own brilliant prose, as well as by a new aesthetic climate prepared to reverse historic judgements in favor of ‘pop’ sensibilities of all kinds, Los Angeles . . . the Four Ecologies became a turning-point in the valuation of the city by the international intelligentsia. Adopted universally as the textbook on Los Angeles, it established standards – vernacular, decentralist and promiscuous – that continue to frame art-world views of what is happening in California south of the Tehachapis. In face of this resurgent neo-boosterism, it was left to a local art critic, Peter Plagens, to register a principled dissent against the enshrining of Banham’s book:
When the frail last defenses of the progressive architect are bartered on the counter of hipness, when an ostensibly perceptive specialist takes a look at this obvious dung-heap and pronounces it a groove, then the capitalist quick-buck juggernaut will all the more quickly kill off the green that’s left.144
Although Plagens’s bitter warning about the ideological appropriation of Banham was ignored, the latter’s admirers were forced to admit that he had been in error on at least one important point. In a note on Downtown – ‘because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves’ – Banham had dismissed the ‘recentering’ strategy and depreciated the city’s need for a conventional center.145 Given the Downtown doldrums of the early 1970s, it was impossible for him to have foreseen the landrush in the 1980s of Japanese and Canadian capital, in the context of epochal geopolitical shifts, that has made Downtown 1990 second only to Tokyo as a financial pole of the Pacific Rim. Nor would it have been easy in 1971 to envision how the traditional Downtown–Westside rivalry – which Buffy Chandler had tried to reconcile in the late 1950s – would be increasingly pacified by a functional sorting-out of central-place roles (i.e., Downtown as international financial center, Century City as the capital of entertainment law, LAX as aerospace headquarters, and so on), and by the gradual inter-elite acceptance of an ecumenical regionalism vis-à-vis the world market.
This new geography of power has concentrated cultural affluence in two overweening arts acropolises. On Bunker Hill, along a Grand Avenue axis, the 1964 Music Center has been joined by Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art [1986] (which ‘fills the box labeled “Culture” ’) soon to be followed by the Bella Lewitzky Dance Gallery and Frank Gehry’s monumental Disney Concert Hall.146 Other world-celebrity architects and artists, including Michael Graves and David Hockney, are involved in private developments focused around the Los Angeles Public Library, at the southern foot of Bunker Hill. Meanwhile, sixteen miles west, in the Sepulveda Pass near Westwood, Richard Meier (‘perhaps the world’s leading architect’)147 is designing the $300 million J. Paul Getty Center: a museum, library and research center for the largest arts endowment in history ($3 billion plus). On the other side of the San Diego Freeway, in Westwood proper, octogenarian Armand Hammer is preparing his own megalomaniacal art mausoleum, while the over-endowed, over-built campus of UCLA bulges with the expatriate cream of European postmodernism (including in a recent year Baudrillard, Derrida and Jencks).
THE MUSEUM ARCHIPELAGO
As previously mentioned, large developers dominate every level of this new cultural superstructure. The chairman, for example, of the mayor’s recent blue-ribbon taskforce on the arts was Thomas Maguire III, the region’s biggest commercial developer, who sponsors the feature ‘Art and Culture’ on local public television and whose Library Tower Downtown incorporates artwork from David Hockney. Southern California’s largest homebuilder, Eli Broad, is the dominating presence on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which raises land values in $1.2 billion California Plaza. Donald Bren, meanwhile, the state’s leading latifundista as owner of the Irvine Company, is reported to ‘live only for his art collection’. And, lately, the new rentier elite of Japanese corporations Downtown has also discovered that culture fertilizes real estate. Shuwa Investments, which owns more than $1 billion of prime local property, has offered Mayor Bradley the initial contribution towards a ‘Statue of Liberty’ for Los Angeles (the favored proposal