CROSSROADS

Adolfo Nodal is leaving the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, which he has led for 12 years. During his tenure, he helped shape the city’s Cultural Master Plan, which included a healthy emphasis on L.A.’s diversity. Paul Holdengraber has lived here about half as long as Nodal. Since 1998, he has been director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Institute of Art and Cultures, an ambitious lecture series that has attracted artists, writers and thinkers from around the world to discuss cultural matters of the day. Nodal and Holdengraber were brought together to consider what divides, unites and defines culture in Los Angeles.

Oscar Garza: I thought we might start by talking about “culture” and “community,” two words that are used a lot in Los Angeles. What do they connote for you?

Al Nodal: For me they’re really interchangeable: culture and community. I see communities in this city coming together because of culture.

Paul Holdengraber: When I think about community, I think about ways to bring people something that is very enabling, that often they already have, which is culture. Oscar Wilde said: “Either you make art popular or you make the people artistic.”

I think people in this city are really hungry for substance. They don’t only want to be fed, they want to be nourished. And if you give them something to really bite on, they will come back for more and more and more and contribute to it.

Garza: Do you sense tension in the fact that in L.A., the words “culture” and “community” almost always go hand in hand with ethnicity.

Nodal: There’s tension, but it’s par for the course in L.A. It’s a place of celebrating ethnicity, multi-ethnicity. To understand the difference between somebody who comes from Africa and somebody who comes from Korea and celebrate those things and the things that bind us together--it’s a great thing. But it’s not an easy thing to do. And tension is part of the growing process.

Holdengraber: It’s what has to make us smarter at finding ways to connect. I prefer the term “inreach” to “outreach.” The director of LACMA [Andrea Rich] once said something rather brilliant about the Institute of Art and Cultures: “It will only be successful if it changes us internally.”

The problem is, museums have for so long been rest homes for Old Masters. The museum has to become a destination. Museums can be the talk of the town. How one hangs something on the wall is a very important issue and a very interesting one. And the most important thing is to argue about it. I prefer people to disagree and to fight over cultural issues--because they are important.

Nodal: Over the last 10 years, this city has really woken up to this cultural life--at the political level, City Hall and all of that. Arts institutions have gotten much smarter about doing things for the people they are supposed to be serving. And the cultural life of the city is giving people a kind of identity that they didn’t have before.

Holdengraber: What caused that to happen?

Nodal: I think it’s just time. This is the time for L.A. There is a critical mass of activity, things like the Central American community coming of age culturally. Basically, before, they’d survive and just sort of get a foothold. Now they’ve gone beyond the survival mode to actually give something back to the community.

Garza: It seems that to deal with the vastness of Los Angeles, people have to seek community in smaller places, whether it’s the neighborhood or their own ethnic group. Does that make the cultural institutions in the city more distant?

Holdengraber: Yes. I always tell people that the word “institute” must be a verb and not a noun. In other words, [we have to] move swiftly and quickly and, instead of being reactive, be proactive. I think big institutions have a much harder time than smaller ones, and it’s very difficult to be all things to all people.

Nodal: Trying to capture the imaginations of a broad community here is very, very difficult. This is the subculture capital of the world. It’s a place where you can be a hot-rod enthusiast and then a Ford hot-rod enthusiast. So people tend to identify with smaller groups.

Holdengraber: Though the real role of culture is to stretch the imagination. One of my favorite lines is what Napoleon said of one of his generals: “He knew everything, but nothing else.” I think it’s important that we learn how to identify with other people. And how one does it, how one brings in people from a variety of backgrounds, [is] by trusting their intelligence.

Nodal: Sometimes things happen in L.A. that really cause everybody to come together. Everybody forgets about all their differences. The [1984] Olympics was a perfect example of that.

Holdengraber: But the Olympics was so long ago. What again will serve as a catalyst?

Nodal: Disney Hall; the new cathedral. People come together for things like that.

Holdengraber: Buildings, buildings. . . .

Nodal: Not just buildings, but social development.

Holdengraber: I recently had an event called “Museums After Fascism,” about what happened in Spain after Franco died in 1975. Think of Bilbao, which [with the opening of a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum branch] has become this incredible place.

Nodal: It’s a social phenomenon.

Holdengraber: And yet so many tensions still exist. They are not erased by buildings, but in some way, buildings bring them to focus.

Nodal: They transform a culture.

Holdengraber: And the Getty, in that way, has been a fabulous place because it’s given people around the country a real awareness that museums are one of the places you include when you come to Los Angeles.

Nodal: It was less successful to the people in L.A.

Holdengraber: Why do you think that?

Nodal: Because of the location. It’s a fantastic place. I love the place. It did a lot in just getting us noticed. But it was less transforming to the culture within the city itself. Buildings like the cathedral and Disney Hall should happen all over the city.

Holdengraber: What are you most proud of in terms of your legacy here?

Nodal: I think that I’m most proud of helping the artists of L.A. I was able to pump money into individual artists, the people who are the makers of culture.

Garza: The Cultural Affairs Department has also been very supportive of identity- or ethnic-based art and organizations. But there has been resistance from, for lack of a better term, the art-for-art’s-sake crowd who felt that they were artists non grata here.

Nodal: We dealt with that by evolving the programs to where artists are given fellowships for the quality of their work. I came from an avant-garde perspective. I ran avant-garde art centers my whole life. I come from the school of “the less you understood art, the more you were supposed to like it.” [laughter] And I evolved from that to supporting artists who really had a role in the community. We needed to make artists part of the social structure, the social fabric of the community.

Holdengraber: Did you give up on “the less you understood, the more you liked it”?

Nodal: No. I understand very little. [laughter]

Holdengraber: Because it seems to me that in our world--and this isn’t true only about Los Angeles--you have to make things relevantand you have to make them understood. Culture is understanding what is foreign, but culture demands effort. To inspire intellectual fervor is my greatest goal. But intellectual fervor doesn’t come easily.

Nodal: I’ve always felt that the rigor you need to deal with the vanguard is the same kind of rigor you need to deal with multiculturalism, to understand differences.

Garza: But there has been a very aggrieved intellectual community that is openly hostile toward multiculturalism. Do you think we’re over that hump?

Nodal: I think people have realized that you’ve got to have multiculturalism. What else are you going to do? We’ve gone beyond trying to force it down everybody’s throat.

Holdengraber: I wouldn’t know how to think except in a multicultural way.

Garza: What do you think of the argument that in Los Angeles, Latino culture--the city’s indigenous culture--has taken a back seat because it’s lumped in with multiculturalism?

Nodal: I don’t think it’s taken a back seat at all.

Garza: The best example is the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture--an idea, more than a decade in the making, finally gets off the ground and then unfortunately has to close its doors. Why can’t Los Angeles support a defining institution for Latino culture?

Nodal: The time will come; it will happen. Things can’t run just on politics. Institutions have got to have good management.

The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach is really doing well. There’s incredible support for it. There’s some talk now about doing a mariachi museum. Other institutions are going to start coming. I don’t think that the Latino community is suppressed in any way. I’ve seen it grow and multiply across the city, and I think the whole multicultural movement helped usher that in.

Garza: So what are the challenges that face L.A.’s diverse cultural communities?

Nodal: All the big institutions--the Getty, LACMA--are really developing the agenda now. I just hope that we don’t forget the individual artists. I just hope we don’t forget the smaller arts institutions at a neighborhood level.

Holdengraber: I think the main thing is finding ways to make people feel that the life of the mind is exciting. To make it organic, rather than something one checks off on a list: Oh, I’ve had a bit of culture. Because when you become a reader or a viewer or a listener, the way you perceive the world and treat others can be enhanced.

Garza: Let me wrap this up by asking the question I brought up when I first called both of you: Is the culture divide in Los Angeles getting wider? Not just the divide created by artists versus institutions but the divide created by politics, the economy, ethnicity. Will a certain amount of tension always prevail?

Nodal: I think tension is good.

Holdengraber: So do I. I think erasing tension is a mistake. I know there are problems all around. I don’t want to disregard them. The worst thing is when there isn’t tension, when there’s politeness. Politeness is very dangerous.

Garza: Maybe I can ask it this way: What will keep the divisions from getting bigger?

Nodal: Economic development. I learned one really fundamental thing during the riots that I should have known already. Without economic development, you can’t have cultural development. People in L.A. are starting to feel good about their position in the world and everybody else’s position in the world, and that opens things up for culture, for people being open to other people. I see all the problems that we have with the city, but I have faith in people, and I think things are going to work out well for L.A.

Holdengraber: You cannot satisfy the whole city of Los Angeles. But you can bring people together who otherwise would not meet. One of the things that brings people together is taking pride in the culture they have and joining the cultural forces around the city. In other words, joining existing institutions or creating new movements or finding new ways of thinking, new ways of contemplating, new ways of encouraging one’s mind to work.

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About This Series Calendar asked three pairs of arts figures to discuss issues confronting the creators, consumers and purveyors of entertainment and the arts. The topics:

Monday: Is free speech being abused in popular culture?

Today: Is L.A.’s diversity creating culture--or a cultural divide?

Wednesday: How will digital technology affect the visual arts?