“Los Angeles 1955–1985”
Centre Pompidou
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