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demonstrate consistent appreciation for the art and artists of Los Angeles. Other Los Angeles artists, with their pugnacious attitudes, followed suit. By the middle of the 1980s, the hegemony of the New York art establishment began to crumble as artists from Los Angeles as well as artists from Europe, Asia, and Central and South America came to be recognized, exhibited, and sold.
    Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight said, “Sixties L.A. was a bellwether. It’s easy to forget that, for most of the last one hundred years, New York was commonly regarded as the only legitimate cultural game in America. Everywhere else was the provinces. But what happened artistically in Los Angeles in the 1960s turned out to be a harbinger of changes to come: In the twenty-first century, serious and informed art production has been thoroughly decentralized around the globe. L.A., the city without a center, became the model.” 2 It is telling that the most complete overview of the city’s contemporary art history was organized in 2006 by France’s Centre Pompidou: Los Angeles, 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital.
    Ironically, it was the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum that inspired collectors anew as Marcia Weisman, by then divorced from Frederick, and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge William Norris and his wife Merry led the charge in the early 1980s to build a Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. It was one of the first museums to include artists on its board—Robert Irwin and Sam Francis—and Frank Gehry agreed to design temporary quarters in a disused city warehouse in Little Tokyo. The Temporary Contemporary proved so successful a venue for large-scale contemporary art that it remained in use though, after a $5 million donation by music mogul David Geffen, it was renamed the Geffen Contemporary. Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed the permanent building, about half a mile west, on Grand Avenue. Ironically, in a city thought to have had overly cautious, foot-dragging collectors, MOCA wound up with the most highly esteemed contemporary art collection in the country, including a large portion of the collection of Count Panza di Biumo.
    As of this writing, the Los Angeles area supports three museums dedicated to contemporary art: MOCA, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, as well as the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and LACMA. In the manner of the self-made tycoons before him, philanthropist Eli Broad has launched plans to open a museum of his own collection adjacent to MOCA in the downtown district. The Pasadena Museum of California Art shows a fair amount of contemporary art. The mandate of the Getty Museum does not embrace contemporary art, but the Getty Research Institute has made it a priority to acquire and catalog archives, images, and documents related to the city’s cultural history and, on occasion, to mount exhibitions, many of which have to do with modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles. Pacific Standard Time, their ambitious initiative to fund and generate exhibitions examining all possible dimensions of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design in Southern California, will be featured in the museums and galleries of the region for an entire year beginning in October 2011.
    The city supports at least one hundred art galleries, fewer than New York, but more than any other city in this country. Though not their original intent, the artists of the sixties who chose to stay in the city and make their stand made it possible for subsequent generations of artists so that, today, the city has one of the largest populations of professional working artists anywhere—in part because of ready employment at the large number of art schools and university art departments. And, of course, the weather.
    Some artists miss the sixties in Los Angeles, where art could be made with almost no financial incentive or consequence. On the