Art Los Angeles

The entry area of Bruce Gray's home is perfectly suited for laying a nice clean bead with a MIG welder. The walls are rusty corrugated aluminum, the floor is concrete, and the front door could accommodate a full-size pickup. With railroad spikes and gas canisters spilling into his frontyard, Gray's decor might raise an eyebrow in some neighborhoods. But not here, not at the Brewery.

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.

Since 1981, Paul Schimmel has been organizing provocative exhibitions in Southern California, first at the old Newport Harbor Art Museum and, for the last seven years, as chief curator of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art.

No, this is not another story about the Getty Center. OK, so it is about the Getty, but only in part and only because it's not possible to review the art year now ending without paying attention to the newly opened behemoth on a Brentwood hilltop and all that it represents. Which brings up a question. Just what is it that the Getty Center does represent, specifically for the art life of Los Angeles?

At the dusty Universal City construction site where 20-foot-tall machines have just burrowed through the Santa Monica Mountains, there is big pride in big construction. And that is why, despite his allegiance to the subway, Metro Rail engineer Ben Fardi finds himself bowing in homage to another Los Angeles opus that in so many ways dwarfs his own: the new Getty Center, that castle of steel and travertine that has risen like a medieval stronghold on a Brentwood mountaintop.

Dorothy Buffum Chandler, whose strength and determination were credited with revitalizing the cultural heritage of Los Angeles, died Sunday. She was 96. Mrs. Chandler also was the wife for 50 years of the late Norman Chandler, third publisher of the Los Angeles Times. She was the mother of Otis Chandler, the former publisher and chairman of the board of directors of Times Mirror Co., and Mrs. Camilla Chandler Frost, who is active on several cultural, educational and corporate boards. Mrs.

Something's changed for art made in Los Angeles. Difficult to describe, the change is not a movement, not a style shift, not a trend. Rather, it's a change in public perception, the kind that settles quietly and irreversibly into place before you even notice it at all.

Despite its growth and evolution as a major art center, Los Angeles has never developed a support structure equal to its home-grown talent. That's the bottom line, and it hasn't changed significantly in the 1990s. But new players have emerged.