Los Ángeles vive su 'fiebre del oro' artística con ocho galerías internacionales

The doors to Frieze opened on a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and within minutes the hallways filled with the kind of people who make headlines simply by looking at art. The Weeknd drifted past sculptures from the Otani studio and Takashi Murakami's signature smiling flowers. Pierce Brosnan wandered through Pace's offerings with the distracted gaze of someone accustomed to being watched. Will Ferrell and his wife Viveca Paulin spent considerable time in conversation with gallery representatives—Ferrell has earned a reputation in art circles as a serious collector with genuine knowledge. The opening marked the beginning of what Los Angeles calls its art week, a compressed cultural moment that the city has learned to stretch across four days and call a season.

Frieze had come to Los Angeles three times before, but this edition felt different. The fair, which maintains permanent presences in London, New York, and Seoul, had chosen the West Coast for its first major event of 2022, and the city responded with the kind of attention it reserves for new phenomena. Nearly one hundred galleries set up booths this year, up from sixty at the fair's debut in 2019. Only one gallery, the Korean dealer Kukje, withdrew after shipping costs for artworks became prohibitive—a minor casualty compared to the disruptions other art fairs had endured during the pandemic. Supply chain problems did force the cancellation of a sculpture exhibition that couldn't arrive in time, but the overall momentum suggested the art world was ready to move forward.

Beatrice Shen, one of the directors of Hauser & Wirth, stood in the gallery's sprawling space in downtown Los Angeles's arts district and called it an exciting moment to be present. The gallery had mounted exhibitions of work by the British artist Phyllida Barlow and Gary Simmons, a New York-born painter who had recently relocated to the city. Simmons's show, titled Remembering Tomorrow, presented large-scale works that examined racism through the lens of American popular culture. Hauser & Wirth was also unveiling the first edition in sixty years of Marcel Duchamp's influential catalogue raisonné, originally published in 1959. The artist and filmmaker Miranda July would read selections from the text on Saturday. The gallery itself was planning to open a second location on the city's west side later in the year.

Los Angeles had long marketed itself as a land of opportunity for those willing to leave the East Coast, and that promise was now drawing artists in significant numbers. The influx had triggered a cascade of gallery openings. While West Coast collectors lacked the established prominence of their New York counterparts, the region's technology and cryptocurrency industries were creating a robust market. Shen explained that a substantial generation of artists, many trained at Cal Arts, had established Los Angeles as the reference point for the western United States. These artists influenced younger practitioners, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem. Some galleries and fairs had once predicted that the next major art hub would emerge near Palo Alto, drawn by Silicon Valley wealth, but that forecast had proven wrong.

Christine Messineo, who had taken over as Frieze's director less than ninety days before the fair opened, had relocated the event from the Paramount Studios lot to a space facing the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills—a move that emphasized glamour and visibility. The fair had allocated thirty-nine booths to local galleries, a deliberate effort to amplify Los Angeles artists and help the city establish its own voice rather than remain perpetually shadowed by the East Coast. Luis de Jesús, a local gallerist, was attending Frieze for the first time through the LA Focus section. José Rojas, director of the Mexico City gallery House of Gaga, had also opened an Los Angeles location, viewing it as a natural expansion given the growing number of Los Angeles-based artists he represented and the increasingly fluid dialogue between Mexican and California art scenes.

The expansion was not limited to independent dealers. Major international galleries were using the fair to announce their commitment to the city. Pace, founded in 1960 and representing 113 artists including Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin, had acquired a smaller gallery to establish a presence beginning in April. It would be the gallery's tenth location. David Zwirner, the prominent New York dealer, announced that he would open a three-story space east of Hollywood in January 2023—his second location in the United States for a gallery with offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. In total, eight major galleries, including Sean Kelly and Lisson, had made similar commitments to Los Angeles.

Gagosian, a gallery founded in Los Angeles in 1980, occupied one of the most visited booths at Frieze. It displayed a single work: Dreamer's Folly, a garden pavilion sculpture by Chris Burden, an artist who died in 2015 and left behind an influential body of work. Burden's most recognized piece, Urban Light, consists of 202 restored streetlights from the 1920s that now frame the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum, the city's most significant art institution. Burden had been Gagosian's first represented artist in 1978. The sculpture on view at Frieze was being shown in the United States for the first time. It sold before lunch to a major European art institution whose identity remained undisclosed. The sale was a perfect circle and an unmistakable signal of how hot the market had become.