by James Frey
Second semester of school she takes theater, philosophy, computer science, chemistry. She’s still not sure what she wants to do or study sometimes she thinks doctor sometimes teacher sometimes she thinks she should go into business. She likes the idea of advertising she met a copywriter at a Talk and Tequila event his job sounded fun and exciting, different every day.
She’s at work gossiping with the girls, a clerk on the day shift is dating one of the men in the stock department. The clerk is only twenty-six has already been married twice, the man in the stock department is in his late thirties has never been married. As they discuss whether they think it will last or not a man approaches the counter Esperanza looks towards him it’s Doug he’s smiling tentatively smiling it’s Doug. Her heart falls, leaps, pounds, she’s tried to forget him, get over him, erase the memories the good and bad just erase them, but when she’s alone they always come back. He walks up to the counter smiling, tentatively smiling he looks at her, speaks.
I’ve missed you.
In 1984, the City of Los Angeles hosts the Summer Olympic Games of the twenty-third Olympiad. In retaliation for the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow games, the Soviet Union and the whole of the eastern bloc countries, fourteen in all, do not participate in the games. The United States wins 174 medals, leading all countries, and the games turn a profit of almost $200 million.
Two men sit in a loft on the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles. Both are painters. Painter1 lives in the loft, Painter2 lives near New York.
Painter1: It’s just over 2,000 square feet.
Painter2: Fucking humongous.
Painter1: Costs me $1,800 a month.
Painter2: No fucking way.
Painter1: Have a five-year lease, goes up ten percent every year.
Painter2: That’s nothing.
Painter1: It’s not nothing.
Painter2: You know what you get for $1,800 a month in New York?
Painter1: A bathroom?
Painter2: A bathroom in a bad neighborhood.
They both laugh.
Painter1: It’s why I left, why I came here. The only people still in New York are the ones who’ve already hit it big or have family money.
Painter2: Not me.
Painter1: You’re not in New York, you live in a shitbox in a hideous neighborhood in New Jersey.
Painter2: Yeah.
Painter1: It’s the new world here. We can afford to live, we can afford to work, there are good galleries, and there are tons of collectors with money. Fuck New York. If it’s not dead already, it’s close.
There are more than 500 art galleries in Los Angeles. More than $750 million a year is transacted in art purchases. There are more than 50,000 artists living in the city. If actors, writers and musicians are included, there are more than 400,000.
He has fourteen billion dollars. He made it in real estate, banking, insurance. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, his father was a carpenter his mother stayed home and raised him and his two brothers. He started working at twelve, helping his father, carrying tools, doing odd jobs, organizing supplies. When he wasn’t working he was studying.
He graduated third in his high school class, earned a partial scholarship to USC, enrolled in the undergraduate business school. He kept working with his father, though he was now a fully capable carpenter, and paid for everything, including basic living expenses, that his scholarship didn’t cover. He graduated near the top of his class and got multiple job offers.
He said no to all of them.
He started his own company instead. It was the early 1960s Los Angeles was in the midst of another massive population surge. The city was spreading outwards, east into the desert, south into Orange County, north into the fringes of the San Fernando Valley. People needed, and wanted, well-built affordable housing in safe areas. He borrowed some money bought some land he and his father built a house sold it at a profit.
They reinvested their profits hired a larger crew did it faster. They did it again. Again and again and again. They started working on multiple houses at a time. They started buying larger plots of land, building small developments. They always reinvested their profits. Again and again.
He started a mortgage company that provided mortgages for the homes his company built. He started building large developments in rapidly growing communities. His company earned a reputation for high-quality construction. Everything they built sold quickly. The mortgage company started providing financing for most of the homes. He stopped doing any actual construction work and stayed in the office, or went into the field to look for land. By the time he was thirty he was a multimillionaire. He reinvested. Expanded. Started building developments all over the West Coast. He started an insurance company that sold the new homeowners their insurance. By the time he was forty he had several hundred million dollars.
He went to France. He was thinking of expanding the company into Europe there was land in France that was affordable and met his criteria for development. He was in Paris negotiating the deal for the land and during a break he went to the Louvre. He had an hour he started walking the halls he had never looked at art before, never even really thought of it. Art was for people who were born rich, or for crazy men who cut their ears off, or for people who had too much time on their hands, or it was the junk he needed to stick on the walls of his model homes. He was entranced. He saw the Nike of Samothrace, Aphrodite, the Mona Lisa. He saw Fra Angelico, Goya, Delacroix, Rubens, Michelangelo’s Slave, he stood in front of Titian and wept he didn’t know why. He called his attorney, said close the deal without me, spent the rest of the day wandering looking astonished devastated confused overjoyed. He went to the Orsay the next day saw Manet, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso he knew nothing but felt everything the next day the Musée Rodin and stood in front of The Gates of Hell for an hour two it was the most beautiful most terrifying thing he had ever seen, he went inside and he saw The Kiss and he knew he was in love, he knew he was in love.
He stopped in New York on his way home. He had married several years earlier, he and his wife had two children, he told his wife he was going to be delayed a couple days. He went to the Met, MoMA, he walked the spiraling hall of the Guggenheim, he walked through the galleries of Fifty-seventh Street. He spoke to no one. Just walked and looked and felt and fell deeper. He went to an auction house he didn’t know if there were any auctions there weren’t so he stood in the foyer and looked at catalogs of upcoming auctions.
He went home. He told his wife she was surprised he asked her to go back to New York. They went a month later. They checked into a hotel and spent three days. He took her to all of the museums to all of the galleries he tried to explain what he saw and what he felt and why he was in love they stood outside of Warhol’s Factory and stared at the people coming in and out.
He started coming to New York every couple months for a couple days sometimes his wife came sometimes their two children both girls came, sometimes he came alone. He started buying paintings a Picasso lovers shattered into multiple perspectives a Matisse flowers in a vase and a Modigliani thin young woman looking in the mirror. He had them shipped to Los Angeles and put them in their house. They did something to him every time he walked past them, made him laugh or smile, made him sad, made him think, sometimes he tried to imagine what the painter was thinking when he made a certain stroke, used a certain color. He walked by them as often as he could they did something sometimes he cried.
He started buying more and he filled the house with paintings that could hang in museums. He built a bigger house he had the architect build galleries for the paintings. He hired someone to look for art for him and manage and care for what he already owned. He bought more the new house wasn’t big enough so he bought a building he filled it so he bought a bigger building filled it. He worked. He spent time with his family.
He looked at art. That was his life. He decided he didn’t want to work anymore he sold his companies they were worth billio
ns. He spent time with his family. He looked and bought and spent time with his art. That was his life.
There were others like him, before him. There was Getty in Malibu his home became a museum his foundation became an institution. Norton Simon in Pasadena he left it for the public to see and love and learn.
Entertainment moguls heads of studios of agencies of record companies of empires they chased the same things the same beautiful things he chased. There were others like him and before him but there was no one as obsessed, devoted, no one as wealthy, no one as much in love.
He became the biggest collector in the world. He built a new house designed by the world’s preeminent architect titanium, concrete and glass. He built a separate space on the same land a perfect gallery made of titanium concrete and glass and rotated masterpieces in and out. Artists came to him the most famous artists in the world and they made things for him because he loved them. He bought another building. He started a foundation. He amassed the greatest collection on the planet. He did it all for love.
His children are grown, his wife still with him. They travel the world looking at art, talking about art, thinking about art. He spends $250 million a year acquiring art. It is spread throughout the city at museums, in his building, at his home and in his gallery. Museums from around the world come to borrow it they hope he’ll give it to them someday. No one knows where it will go when he’s gone if his children will get it if he’ll give it all away if there will be a museum with his name. For now it sits, the greatest art collection in the world, in Los Angeles. Put together by a man who understands what its financial value is but would keep it all if it wasn’t worth a penny. No one knows where it’s going or if it’s going anywhere at all. He doesn’t know. And right now he doesn’t care. All he cares about is that he is in love, with everything in it, truly and deeply in love.
UCLA School of Art and the California Institute of Art known as CalArts, both of which are located in Los Angeles, are considered among the top five art schools in the United States. Three of the top five film schools in America, USC School of Cinema, the American Film Institute and UCLA Film School, are located in Los Angeles. One of the top five design schools, the Art Center College of Design, is located in Los Angeles, two of the top ten architecture schools, UCLA School of Architecture and the Southern California Institute of Architecture, are located in Los Angeles.
An interview between an art critic from France and a famous artist from Los Angeles. It takes place in Venice, at his house, on his back porch, a block from the ocean. The sun is shining. They are both drinking tea.
Critic: It is nice here, no?
Artist. Always.
Critic: Always?
Artist. It’s the same every day. Sunny warm. Because we’re near the ocean, it’s never hotter than eighty-five and never colder than sixty. And no humidity.
Critic: Does that influence your work?
Artist: It doesn’t in that I don’t do work that relates to weather. It does in that I like the sun and it makes me happy and I get to work outside if I feel like it. And because I also take photos, I can work pretty much whenever I want. There is always good light and easy conditions.
Critic: Your photos, the most famous ones, are of gas stations, pools, parking lots, fast-food restaurants, highways. Why?
Artist: I see them. Every day, everywhere I turn. I started thinking about them as objects, as cultural symbols, as things that are mundane and beautiful and ignored. Placing them into a different context helped me understand that there are works of art all around us. We might not see them or care about them or look twice at them, but they are there. When I take a series of photos, and place them next to each other in a gallery, people understand it.
Critic: When you came here, in the early ’60s, Los Angeles was a cultural wasteland. What made you want to live here?
Artist: I wanted to learn to surf, and I wanted to live near the beach and I wanted to look at girls in bikinis every day.
Critic: Seriously?
Artist: That was part of it, for sure. But another part had to do with LA’s culture and LA’s place within our culture. To call LA, then or now, a cultural wasteland, is in my opinion, an incredibly ignorant remark. Los Angeles is the cultural capital of the world. No other city even comes close to it. And when I say culture, I am talking about contemporary culture, not what mattered fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. Contemporary culture is popular music, television, film, art, books. The other disciplines, dance, classical music, poetry, theater, they don’t hold any real weight anymore, their audiences are small, and they’re more like cultural oddities than the cultural institutions. More people watch TV every night than go to every ballet performance in every city of the world for a year. More rap and rock CDs are sold every year than classical CDs have sold for the last twenty years. And movies, fuck, movies are humongous. I’d be willing to bet that the highest-grossing film of the year grosses more than every show on Broadway put together, probably two or three or four times as much. And the only things that rival the influence movies have on our culture, and the world’s culture, are TV and popular music. And all of it, all that product, all that entertainment, all that culture comes from here. I didn’t want to be part of New York. I didn’t want to be part of some stagnant preexisting art world that didn’t know it was being outdated. I wanted to go to the New World, and I felt this was it, because at some point, books and art, which are still in New York, are going to follow the rest of our culture and come here. I wanted to be part of the first wave of the new, be part of something fresh instead of something that was rotting, to go to the place where others would eventually follow.
Critic: And you really think that’s going to happen?
Artist: It’s already happening. No one can live in New York anymore because it’s too fucking expensive, so they come here where it is still relatively cheap. And the gallery system in New York is too closed.
Everyone there has these huge rents for these huge spaces and needs massive amounts of money to keep their doors open. That forces them to show, and sell, what they know people will pay for in an immediate way. That discourages great new work because new artistic ground is broken by taking risks, and the galleries there can’t afford to do that.
If they do and the shit doesn’t sell, which is usually the case for young artists doing new work, the galleries have to close their doors. Here they take the risks and show work no one else is willing to take on.
That also draws the artists doing the work because they know they can show it here. Eventually, because of that, because the newest freshest work is being created here and shown here, everything will move here. And the economics of the city will support it. There are a ton of rich motherfuckers here willing to spend money on art. People with spectacular collections that will eventually make their way into our museums, which will then rival New York’s, the museums in Paris, Rome, Madrid, anywhere.
Critic: How long do you think it will take?
Artist: Could take ten years, twenty years, thirty years. It could, if New York gets flattened by terrorists, happen overnight. It will happen though. It’s inevitable.
Critic: And where will you be?
Artist: Might be here on this porch. Might be down the street on a bar stool. Might be in the ground. Don’t know.
Critic: And your legacy?
Artist: I was the first here. And I saw it all coming.
A few artists living and working in Los Angeles, the medium or mediums in which they work, and the highest price ever paid for a piece of their work in a public auction.
Ed Ruscha, painter, photographer—$3,595,500
Paul McCarthy, performance artist, sculptor—$1,496,000
John McCracken, sculptor—$358,637
Chris Burden, performance and conceptual artist–$84,000
Robert Graham, sculptor—$390,000
Edward Kienholz (deceased), sculptor—$176,000
Raymond Pettibon, painter�
�$744,000
Kenny Scharf, painter—$180,000
Mike Kelley, multi-media artist—$2,704,000
Mark Grotjahn, painter—$530,000
Lari Pittman, painter—$120,000
Richard Pettibone, painter—$688,000
Catherine Opie, photographer—$27,500
Sam Francis (deceased), painter—$4,048,000
Ed Moses, painter—$28,400
Jim Shaw, painter, sculptor—$656,000
Ken Price, sculptor—$228,000
John Baldessari, photographer—$4,408,000
Liz Larner, sculptor—$27,600
Joe Goode, painter—$38,400
Charles Ray, sculptor—$2,206,000
Billy Al Bengston, painter—$10,800
Jorge Pardo, painter—$156,000
RB Kitaj, painter—$569,169
Richard Diebenkorn (deceased), painter—$6,760,000
Robert Therrien, sculptor—$84,000
Nancy Rubins, sculptor—$2,280
Robert Irwin, painter—$441,600
David Hockney, painter—$5,407,407
Art museums in Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Latino Art Museum, Palos Verdes Art Center, UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art & Cultural Center, Watts Towers Art Center, University Art Museum—Cal State Long Beach, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Petterson Museum of Intercultural Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Long Beach Museum of Art, LACE—Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Hancock Memorial Museum, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art—Pepperdine University, Downey Museum of Art, Craft & Folk Art Museum, Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Huntington Library, Art Gallery, & Botanical Gardens, Museum of African-American Art, Museum of Latin American Art, Norton Simon Museum of Art, Museum of Neon Art (MONA), J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center.