SoCal Cool: Move over, New York. Thanks to a recent run of museum and gallery openings, Los Angeles is going from art-world upstart to established star.

The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The hottest new gallery in Los Angeles doesn’t even exist yet. The words l&m arts are affixed to the facade of a historic brick power plant in Venice, but inside the building, which is being refitted and expanded by Tadao Ando protégé Kulapat Yantrasast, the exhibition spaces are empty except for stray tools, and the only functioning office on-site is the contractor’s modular unit, which looks like a double-wide Porta-Potty. That hasn’t slowed down the summer chatter on the L.A. art scene about the so-called new L&M space—legendary L.A. gallerist Irving Blum, for one, admires it—even though invitations to the inaugural exhibition of new work by Paul McCarthy won’t be printed for weeks to come.

The gallery is the first out-of-town expansion from a pair of New York dealers, Dominique Lévy and Robert Mnuchin, best known for their museum-quality historical shows in an Upper East Side town house. And it’s one of a spate of projects in Los Angeles that is quickly changing the shape of the local art world, and perhaps even subtly shifting the balance of power on the American art scene.

“I’ve felt for two or three years an incredibly strong creative energy from Los Angeles,” says Lévy. “I felt that the old, postwar pole of Paris–New York had become Berlin–Los Angeles.”

Of course, cultural geopolitics is not the only explanation for L&M’s move, Lévy admits. It stems primarily from the gallery’s strategic business decision to move into the lucrative market known as “primary sales,” which means works fresh from the artist’s studio rather than the secondhand art Lévy and Mnuchin handle in New York. Since Manhattan’s crowded gallery scene was already “saturated,” says Lévy, she first looked to Europe before deciding that L.A. had become a “new cultural hub” capable of returning dividends on L&M’s large gallery investment.

Matthew Marks, the merchant prince of New York’s Chelsea gallery district, recalls facing a similar decision—and reaching a similar decision—when he was considering what to do next. Marks had already opened four spaces in New York (three of which he continues to operate), and had the cash flow to fund an expansion wherever he wanted, thanks to a lineup of artists that includes Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin and Andreas Gursky. After years of keeping an apartment in London with an eye toward opening there, Marks instead decided to go west, trading his London flat for a house in the Hollywood Hills. Why? “It’s a feeling,” he says. More tangible reasons include the obvious fact that L.A. is closer than New York for those rich collectors and museums scattered across the western half of the continent, from Mexico City to Seattle.

From: http://www.wmagazine.com/