Palming a remote-control wand, Eugenio Lopez slowly rotated a plasma screen television suspended from a bedroom ceiling at his multimillion-dollar house atop the hills of Trousdale Estates.
"Look at this," said a delighted Lopez, as he activated a hydraulic mechanism that lifted a screen scaled for an outdoor drive-in and then tucked it out of sight in some overhead panels.
"It's only the second one they ever made," said Lopez, like a 36-year-old kid with an incomparable new toy.
Angelenos enjoy their contraptions, as is well known. They love their amenities and their accouterments, and they so relish the trappings of the good life that at times one can be forgiven for concluding that the satirists who relentlessly mine cliches about lotus-eaters are actually stating the bare facts.
"I'm just an Indian from Mexico City," said Lopez ingenuously. If so, then this report is being written by Marie of Romania.
In fact, Lopez is the scion of a Mexican juice-bottling fortune, an only child and a hereditary billionaire who is among a select group of people who are, not altogether quietly, reconfiguring the social face of Los Angeles.
That they are employing the same cultural vehicles people have always used to advance themselves socially -- support of museums and collecting, mainly -- is not so surprising. Few things have a more cleansing effect on wealth than art does, and Los Angeles, with its current surfeit of billionaires, seems better positioned than it has in a long time to steal some of the art-world thunder from cities like London and New York.
"Los Angeles has become a complex global city," the artist Barbara Kruger said last week, over sunset-colored cocktails at the Bar Marmont in Hollywood. "You couldn't have said that 25 years ago," added Kruger, who has made a career of diagramming the ever-evolving configurations of power in works that often read like agitprop.
Besides its undisputed dominance of popular entertainment, Los Angeles can also lay claim to a Museum of Contemporary Art with what is widely acknowledged to be among the best contemporary collections in the country. It is a town whose artists have definitively shed the taint of regionalism to become stars on the international scene. No contemporary art collection could be thought complete without Los Angeles artists like Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley or Nancy Rubins. And, after years of neglecting Ed Ruscha, the most emblematic of Los Angeles artists, collectors are now lining up to buy his works.
But perhaps as important to the city's current status is the emergence here of a cadre of super collectors, people like Lopez with pockets deep enough to match their aesthetic appetites. There are currently dozens of such collectors in Los Angeles, people whose preferred mode of transportation is likely to be a private Gulfstream V; whose department-store-sized houses require small armies to staff; whose acquisitive urges are consecrated to the consumption of art.
"Los Angeles isn't the way it was in the past, where people were totally focused on tennis courts and cars," said Jane Nathanson, a collector who was the chairwoman of a US$1,000-a-ticket gala last night to commemorate the 25th anniversary of MOCA. It was one of those unusual events where the diverse vectors of the city's power population were expected to intersect, the producer Brian Glazer rubbing shoulders with the billionaire developer Eli Broad, and the artist Takashi Murakami seated cheek by jowl with Peter Morton or Chloe Sevigny.
As recently as a quarter-century ago, the idea of a contemporary art museum was considered by one of its founders, the collector Marcia Weisman, a hallucination, a case of "dreaming off." Today, said Nathanson, contemporary art patronage has become a defining feature.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
INSPIRING: Taiwan has been a model in the Asia-Pacific region with its democratic transition, free and fair elections and open society, the vice president-elect said Taiwan can play a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) told a forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the nation’s resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges. “Not only can Taiwan help, but Taiwan can lead ... not only can Taiwan play a leadership role, but Taiwan’s leadership is important to the world,” Hsiao told the annual forum hosted by the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation think tank. Hsiao thanked Taiwan’s international friends for their long-term support, citing the example of US President Joe Biden last month signing into law a bill to provide aid to Taiwan,
China’s intrusive and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific region are “illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” new US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said on Friday, adding that he would continue working with allies and partners to keep the area free and open. Paparo made the remarks at a change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, where he took over the command from Admiral John Aquilino. “Our world faces a complex problem set in the troubling actions of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and its rapid buildup of forces. We must be ready to answer the PRC’s increasingly intrusive and
STATE OF THE NATION: The legislature should invite the president to deliver an address every year, the TPP said, adding that Lai should also have to answer legislators’ questions The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday proposed inviting president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to make a historic first state of the nation address at the legislature following his inauguration on May 20. Lai is expected to face many domestic and international challenges, and should clarify his intended policies with the public’s representatives, KMT caucus secretary-general Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said when making the proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Procedure Committee. The committee voted to add the item to the agenda for Friday, along with another similar proposal put forward by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The invitation is in line with Article 15-2