Art Spotlight: Ferus Fetish
[From left to right: Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston, and Larry Bell. Photo by Howard Wise]
Ferus Gallery was the hotspot of the midcentury L.A. art scene. But it wasn’t the only one, writes art critic Peter Frank
Everything old is new again, especially in an art world that (literally) values its history but is always on the lookout for a good investment. So while bidding wars erupt over obscure contemporary artists because they come from the right school or gallery or country, whole movements and art scenes that hardly rated a footnote ten years ago are suddenly dug out of the basement, and artists whose phones haven’t rung since they were rotary suddenly have to get answering machines—and e-mail, and agents, and calendars. The cutting-edge artists of postwar Los Angeles, for instance, attracted much attention in their day, and not just locally; many Angelenos who emerged back then jumped from local group shows into Whitney Biennials and even enjoyed their first one-person exhibitions in New York galleries such as Pace and Castelli. Similarly, La Cienega Boulevard’s “gallery row” featured outlets vigorous, sophisticated, and well-supported enough to show the latest work from New York and San Francisco and even Europe.
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