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January 10, 2007

los angeles lagos mexico city

Caryn writes in art.blogging.la:

One of the complaints I hear most about Los Angeles is the fact that it's "spread out." I've often used this complaint myself, especially on my drive home every night, and it's one of the reasons why I created this blog - to cohere the vast sprawl of the LA art scene. However during a September panel discussion I did at Gallery 825 when I was hearing this complaint voiced loudly as a major negative, I suddenly realized that what I thought was a detriment to LA was, in fact, one of the things I love most about this city.

What this sprawl does, besides annoy you in traffic, is allow diversity to reign supreme in Los Angeles - one can experience many different Los Angeleses including sub-scenes of music, fashion, art, food, and business. Chinatown offers a different art variety than Culver City and it goes on down the line. Our sprawl of art schools and museums, from the Getty to Orange County Museum of Art and everything in-between, is actually what makes the art here so exciting and so very different from any other city in the U.S. I mean, isn't there a reason why we "Los Angeles" is synonymous with "Southern California?" You can't put your finger on what's going on here and, granted it's not all good but it's still quite fantastic.

This is, of course, the American way of saying that LA is the US city that most echoes the emerging global standard for urban areas. When I was in Nairobi I kept thinking that if I closed my eyes, abstracted out the people and blinked quickly I could be in LA, or any other warm weather megacity.

Posted by ebogjonson in Kenya, city of angels, places, on January 10, 2007 3:07 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kai at January 12, 2007 10:35 AM