Anyone stuck in a traffic jam on...

Anyone stuck in a traffic jam on the 405 between the Valley and Los Angeles has noticed an enormous pale building on a hilltop: the Getty Center, a museum, an already world-famous work of architecture and an instant new L.A. landmark. Recently, a New York-based magazine felt quite comfortable opening its Getty Center piece with the following observation from one of our richer luminaries:

“This is too good for Los Angeles. I love it, but people here won’t appreciate it. There is nothing else here that could stand up to this. Look around, everything’s transitory. But this is solid. This is permanent.”

I imagine this gentleman on the Getty hilltop, with all L.A. spread beneath him--our sprawling city of many tongues, colors and cultures; our cacophonous streets of so many different musics, engines, passions; so many fates joined to one fate, the collective fate of our city. And somewhere down there is me. And you. From the insulation of his perch, this gentleman sees the glitter of our lights, the effort of our lives and--he decides a building is too good for us.

My first response isn’t printable. My second is: “Hey, how do you know what I will or won’t appreciate?” But let’s be more charitable than he, and leave aside his offhand insult to several million hard-working folks whom he doesn’t know. More important are the questions. What is he talking about: “solid,” “permanent,” “transitory”? And why would anyone think any building, any art, is “too good for Los Angeles”?

For one thing, permanence is not exactly the ground we walk on around here. Every person and artwork is within seven miles of any number of active fault lines capable of producing major quakes. After the recent Northridge and Kobe shakes, engineers had to admit that no building materials are entirely immune to a high-Richter temblor.

But, geology aside, culture itself is transitory--and the Getty’s collection proves it. Aren’t its treasures largely the product of cultures that no longer exist? Every era has its day, and then that day ends; power shifts to other peoples in other lands, and art follows the money. The Acropolis didn’t mean to become a ruin, but its creators could no longer afford to keep it up, and then the British came along and took what was left. What right have we to speak of permanence, especially from the veranda of a museum that thrives on the impermanence of others?

But when that luminary spoke so dismissively about art and architecture being “transitory” with us Angelenos, his vision didn’t encompass geology or the fate of cultures; he was talking about us.

And who are we? According to one business journal, we are “the most ethnically diverse city in the world.” We speak a hundred or more languages. We are from every country in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, the subcontinent, Africa, Europe and virtually every city and town in the United States. Take the Sunset Boulevard bus from East Los Angeles to Beverly Hills and you see store signs in Spanish, Korean, Thai, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Hebrew, Russian and English. You see Aztecs sharing sidewalks with Celts. You see descendants of the Zulu waiting for buses with descendants of the Ming Dynasty. The very fact that we are here, as opposed to where our ancestors called home, is a testament to how much we are products of the transitory.

The vast majority of us had to leave something behind to come here, and, on arrival, had to push aside what was here in order to make room to live--room for who we are. And wasn’t that always the nature of Los Angeles’ invitation? That the city was wide-open enough, undefined enough, willing to change enough, to accommodate the myriad tribes who would become Angelenos? The city itself is the result of the inexorable movement of the world’s economies and peoples. It’s unreasonable to demand respect for “permanence” from a citizenry who have in common nothing so much as their experience of impermanence.

To speak derisively of how transitory we are is to be dismissive of the basic questions Angelenos live with. Art is about the expression of an individual and a cultural identity. When a woman is half-Mexican Catholic and half-Hungarian Jew, and meditates at a Buddhist temple; loves African American pop music and German string quartets; is reading a Russian novel, eating Thai food, going to Hollywood movies, wearing Asian-made clothing; speaks a tongue her grandparents could not understand; lives in a neighborhood where half the signs are in languages she can’t read; works in a neighborhood where the reinvention of gender is encouraged, and shares all this, willy-nilly, every time she walks down the street, with people as patchwork as she, then the question of identity becomes more of a life quest than it ever was for folks growing up in more homogeneous societies. Her life takes on all the great questions of art--questions of what, among all this hodgepodge, is truly herself.

Multiply that by several million, and you have the enormous mural-in-the-flesh that we call Los Angeles. Our very identities are at stake. Identities we’ve lost, and identities we’re trying to create. If that isn’t the stuff of great art, then what is?

Is the Getty Center “too good for Los Angeles”? Or is Los Angeles too fantastic, too many-sided, too involved in its epic moment in history, to be reflected in a building that an elite has constructed upon a hill?

The Internet brings the world to our computer screens. But what the Internet does electronically, Los Angeles embodies on its streets. As we work out our individual identities, and our relationships with each other across the old barriers of race and ethnicity, we are determining more than the fate of this city. Together, we are living an epic poem of our history, and in our lives we are deciding a crucial question of the 21st century: Can so many different cultures, thrown together amid so many new technologies, forge a new, fruitful and peaceful daily life?

Human beings in every era, and in every conceivable situation, have felt compelled to create art. That alone testifies to its necessity in our lives. But, as Boris Pasternak said, “The biography of a poet is found in what happens to those who read him.” The worth of the Getty’s art, and the grandeur of that building, ultimately depends for its cultural value not on what the critics say, but on the unfinished work of art that is Los Angeles.*