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.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Wednesday said that a new chip manufacturing technology called “A16” is to enter production in the second half of 2026, setting up a showdown with longtime rival Intel over who can make the fastest chips. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of advanced computing chips and a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple, announced the news at a conference in Santa Clara, California, where TSMC executives said that makers of artificial intelligence (AI) chips will likely be the first adopters of the technology rather than a smartphone maker. Analysts said that the technologies announced on
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
CALL FOR DIALOGUE: The president-elect urged Beijing to engage with Taiwan’s ‘democratically elected and legitimate government’ to promote peace President-elect William Lai (賴清德) yesterday named the new heads of security and cross-strait affairs to take office after his inauguration on May 20, including National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Wellington Koo (顧立雄) to be the new defense minister and former Taichung mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) as minister of foreign affairs. While Koo is to head the Ministry of National Defense and presidential aide Lin is to take over as minister of foreign affairs, Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) would be retained as the nation’s intelligence chief, continuing to serve as director-general of the National Security Bureau, Lai told a news conference in Taipei. Koo,
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues