Call it cynicism if you must, but if I went to someplace called the “Arts District” in most North American cities, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find art; in most cases, I’d expect to find nothing at all. The name smacks of official desperation, bringing to mind last-ditch efforts to rebrand blocks you’d never even walk through with an absolute minimum outlay of money or effort. You can envision the meetings: what revitalizes tired, dangerous industrial areas? Why, artists. And what do artists do? Arts, of course. And up go the signs. That an influx of artists in the sixties and seventies actually did bring Manhattan’s Lower East Side back from the brink of more or less literal destruction has put ideas into the head of other cities across the continent ever since. It brings to mind the Melanesian “cargo cult,” whose members supposedly built imitation airstrips out of wood and radios out of coconuts in hopes of therefore receiving the same deliveries of goods as did their departed World War II occupiers. The cargo cultists staffed their bamboo control towers and waved their semaphore leaves as imitatively as they could, so the story goes, but nothing ever happened.
It thus comes as a surprise that, in Los Angeles’ Arts District, something has actually happened, and, more to the point, continues to happen. Yet for quite some time, it seemed unclear whether it had or would. “Downtown was doomed,” says the narrator of Thom Andersen’s documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” of the city’s faltering core in the immediate postwar era. “In the eighties, it went vertical, and there was an attempt to promote loft living on its eastern margins, an effort advertised in a few films, but even artists found the new urbanism daunting.” We now know this area, between downtown proper and the Los Angeles River’s west bank, as the Arts District. Back in 2004, when Andersen’s film came out, the neighborhood already had its name, but evidently it still lacked its current regard. Less than a decade before that, the Arts District didn’t even merit an entry in Leonard and Dale Pitt’s encyclopedia “Los Angeles A to Z”, though the law that put artists’ residences in formerly industrial buildings above-board goes back to 1981. You may even now venture into the Arts District and find yourself unimpressed, but bear in mind the way we’ve framed so much of Los Angeles today: don’t look at what it is; look at what it’s becoming.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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