React, but don't try to predict the future

Everyone has had the experience of disagreeing with a critic, but do critics ever second-guess themselves? We asked Calendar's critics whether there are any reviews they regret. One in a series of occasional articles.

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When "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art shortly after New Year's in 1992, the show marked a cultural turning point. An unprecedented boom in the art market had hit the skids, and suddenly the conflation of vital new artists and a strong institutional base, both of which had been building in the city throughout the 1980s, galvanized attention around art's value, rather than its price. Something crystallized in the zeitgeist. Los Angeles, long a second city, moved squarely into the international top tier for contemporary art.

I was enthusiastic in print. "Perhaps the greatest achievement of this large and ambitious show is simply the vigor with which it acknowledges important art being made here," I wrote. That feeling was widespread -- not least among the more than 5,000 people who jammed the opening night party at Little Tokyo's Geffen Contemporary but also among the generally favorable reviews the show garnered. Word traveled fast that something big was up.

The glaring exception was the New York Times. The Manhattan art world had been coming to terms with the 1980s' return to prominence of European contemporary art, headquartered in Germany, a full generation after the ruination brought by World War II. For nearly half a century, New York pretty much had the territory to itself. Perhaps sensing that its postwar rank as America's sole major center for new art was also at an end, the New York Times huffed, "The disappointment of the exhibition is less its attention-grabbing sensationalism than the pretense that this sensationalism amounts to something substantial and challenging." "Helter Skelter" got slammed.

I didn't like everything about the show either -- didn't like all the art in it and did complain about some things I thought should not have been left out. But there was an obvious abundance of terrific work, and most of its 16 artists are now important international figures.

For years after, whenever I recall "Helter Skelter" in my mind's eye, the first image that usually pops into my head is Nancy Rubins' monumental sculpture, "Trailers, Drawings and Hot Water Heaters." A "tower of power" composed from industrial junk stacked in a rickety, Brancusi-like endless column and plastered with sheets of paper covered in a silvery skin of dense graphite marks, it reached into the rafters. The precarious pile was held together with what seemed like miles of baling wire.