Art Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, the good things often slip away in the night. One morning you head for your favorite breakfast spot only to discover it's been turned into a used-clothing store. No one seems to know why. It's just got switched. When I first came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, I remember walking past the old Sunkist building in downtown and thinking how perfect it seemed.

MUSIC Vince Gill The singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist has multiple studio albums on his resume, not to mention 20 Grammys and 18 CMA Awards. Catch a display of his high, lonesome tenor voice and soul-country guitar licks during his current U.S. tour, featuring material from his latest long-player, "Guitar Slinger. " Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. 8 p.m. $29.99. (310) 276-6168. http://www.troubadour.com . ART Modern Art in Los Angeles: Assemblage and Politics Los Angeles artists Ed Bereal, Mel Edwards, George Herms, Nancy Reddin Kienholz and Betye Saar, who used the medium of assemblage to comment on the political climate of postwar America, will discuss the connection between art and social critique.

Heavy cost overruns may have caused Occidental Petroleum officials last summer to use accounting devices to switch millions of dollars from the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center books to other corporate categories. In order to settle a shareholder suit over financing of the center, Occidental had earlier agreed to hold costs for the Westwood facility to $60 million or less. To meet the goal, the oil company had to reduce the price of the museum by $18.

MUSIC Bleeding Knees Club The youthful musical duo from Australia's Gold Coast burst upon the music scene early this year with a catchy treasure trove of garage-pop and surf-punk flavored demos. With the summer release of their first official single, "Have Fun" from the British Noir label, they've solidified their reputation as an irreverent rock 'n' roll force, making their first Southland appearance a must for indie fans. Satellite, 1717 Silverlake Blvd., Silver Lake.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that the landmark California Art Preservation Act--enacted a decade ago to protect artworks from unauthorized alteration or destruction--is powerless to prevent demolition or painting over of murals. But in issuing the ruling, Judge Harvey A. Schneiderman observed that there is virtually no case law to act as a road map for judges called on to adjudicate cases of mural destruction and urged artists and their lawyers to appeal.

During some four decades as an increasingly major center for contemporary art, Los Angeles has had its share of talented dealers. Their galleries have provided essential public platforms for artists and their work. This week, the city lost one of the most gifted when Stuart Regen succumbed to the ravages of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Regen was barely 39, but in slightly more than eight years' time his West Hollywood gallery had assumed a critical position in L.A.'s burgeoning art-ecology.

Alfredo Ramos Martinez is back. The Mexican artist was a big name in Los Angeles during the '30s and '40s when he lived here and did his best work. A powerful painter of monumental portraits and evocative Mexican themes, he exhibited his paintings in local galleries and museums, accepted commissions from Hollywood luminaries and painted murals on garden walls. When he died at 73, in 1946, he left a vast, unfinished mural in the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden at Scripps College in Claremont.

Back in 1954, when Fred Marer learned that something revolutionary was going on at Los Angeles County Art Institute's new ceramics department, he decided to check it out. Marer, a mathematics professor at Los Angeles City College, would stop by the institute (now Otis School of Art and Design), watch Peter Voulkos and his students throw pots in a basement studio, schmooze a while and occasionally buy a piece.

The big stone needed a little rocking. So the homeless man gently nudged it left and right, and then front to back. The basketball-size hunk of granite seesawed for a moment before coming to a stop--perfectly balanced on top of a delicately stacked pile of stones. Fernando Anglero carefully pulled away his hands and slowly stepped back. "It gives me such pleasure when I find the center," he said. "It brings me peace."

The peddler selling fringed shirts didn't have a chance. "No, no, no. We don't want any," insisted the lithe woman clad in black, at the same time shooing him away. The man slowly retreated from the crowd gathered in front of the general store. Conversation turned back to a gallery show opening around the corner. Victoria Mihatovic knows the drill. Like many residents in the artists loft district east of downtown, she is used to taking a stand.

Most of the dozens of art spaces now showing off Southern California art history weren't even around when Ed Ruscha set up his easel and his style in Los Angeles in the 1950s . Ruscha's classic, defining works are keystones in Pacific Standard Time , a series of exhibitions whose 1945-to-1980 range takes a stab at framing two of the biggest and most elusive concepts around: "art" and "Los Angeles. " Ruscha's vision has had a defining hand in both. With his rescue dog Woody padding around his new Culver City studio, Ruscha uses one of his favorite mediums, words, to paint the vast and ambitious canvas of Pacific Standard Time -- and his place in it. What does this exhibition mean to you?

When Art Los Angeles Contemporary opens at Santa Monica's Barker Hangar on Thursday night, hundreds of visitors are expected to make the rounds at more than 65 gallery booths. Also planning to attend are some executives from Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., which is organizing a new art fair to debut here Sept. 30. Depending on whom you ask, the MMPI group will either be quietly observing the competition or actively working to win over disgruntled galleries for its new venture, which it hopes will be a game-changer in the city.

Congratulations are in order ? and maybe a sigh of relief. With its "Nutcracker" performances this weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale (plus repeats through the month in two other Southland venues), Los Angeles Ballet entered its fifth season as a resident professional company. Season 5 and counting: not exactly a golden anniversary but definitely a hard-won benchmark. It's been a turbulent demi-decade for all arts organizations, one in which long-established companies such as Orange County's Ballet Pacifica vanished from the landscape.

When John Baldessari's retrospective "Pure Beauty" opens at the L.A. County Museum of Art on June 27, expect to see several generations of artists on hand for the opening-week events. For as long as he has been making art in Los Angeles, Baldessari has also been, in a less tangible way, making artists: offering suggestions, encouragement and above all conversation to twenty-something students eager to follow in his footsteps by living a life of art. Follow they did, with their own gallery shows, museum shows, teaching gigs, and some commercial successes that have at times even surpassed their teacher's.

Bellhops with luggage carts walked right by. So did teenage girls in tank tops. But a stylish thirtysomething businessman in the lobby of the Standard Hotel downtown couldn't take his eyes off the words. While talking on his cellphone, he stared at a 25-foot-tall, stainless steel LED tower that delivered from floor to ceiling a stream of one-liners, such as "Symbols are more meaningful than things themselves" and "Survival of the fittest applies to men and animals." The businessman might have recognized the LED tower as one of Jenny Holzer's signature artworks, featuring the "truisms" and other sayings that have made her famous.

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian collector of American art whose cache of paintings and sculptures by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and others legitimized the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has died. He was 87. Panza died Friday night in Milan, said MOCA spokeswoman Lyn Winter. No cause was announced. Panza became the first European collector of postwar American art. He was able to connect the dots in a new American aesthetic, playing a large role in promoting Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, as well as catapulting Los Angeles artists to international credibility.

The assistant behind the desk at the Margo Leavin Gallery apologetically confesses that his boss will be late. Midday sun filters through the skylights of the large salon where Albert Oehlen's large expressionistic canvases generate a somber ruckus. After five minutes, Margo Leavin floats into the room, her large brown eyes welling slightly with tears. "You see? This has brought up a lot of emotions for me," she says. "This" is her 25th anniversary as a dealer of contemporary art in Los Angeles.

"The Broadway Mural," John Valadez's landmark, 60-foot-long painting of downtown Los Angeles street life, has been rescued from the auction block. Peter Norton, a Los Angeles-based computer guru and a major collector of contemporary art, has purchased the epic artwork, along with a group of 28 portraits by Valadez.

More than 55 notable galleries will showcase some of their best artists at Pacific Design Center's Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair, so it's the perfect way to tap into cutting-edge global art trends. Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Today to Sun. Hours and ticket prices vary. (323) 851-7530. www.artlosangelesfair.com.

Janet Jackson's fast-tempo track "If" blared over speakers as a handful of sweaty dancers moved in unison, their faces focused as they strained their legs to mimic the intricate moves of their instructor. Then the music stopped. "You feeling the flexibility? You feeling the stretching? You want to feel it here," the instructor said, standing in front of a massive mirror, motioning toward her upper thigh -- her leg extended perfectly straight in front of her. Inside the brightly lighted theater that doubles as a studio in the arts district, these dancers are mostly teenagers.