NOW THAT LOS ANGELES has been recognized as a major center of contemporary art production, inquiring minds want to know how the city’s art world accounts for itself. We might start by asking what it has to offer in the way of an originating myth. The answer is the Ferus Gallery, which mutated from Beat collective in the late ’50s to high-powered commercial enterprise a decade later and is accorded mythic status not because of the history of its programming but because it happened to stage the first exhibition of the Pop art of Andy Warhol. Thus the conventional art history of Los Angeles owes

During an early round of what has become an ongoing series of marathon conversations with French film critic Frédéric Strauss, Pedro Almodóvar remarked, in passing, “Someday, I’ll manage to make an exhibition of all the objects from my films and all the formal ideas they’ve generated.” Nearly fifteen years later, the objects, the films, and the filmmaker himself have become the subject of “¡Almodóvar Exhibition!” cocurated by Strauss and fellow film critic Matthieu Orléan, head of temporary exhibits at the Cinémathèque Française—not so much an exhibition in the artistic sense as a display