LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: TOO MUCH SUN

I love the L.A. art scene.

Not that it's any good - nothing trailed by the term scene could possibly be taken seriously -but because it has no conscience and even less history. Think Schoffman or Danton, two local luminaries whose respective careers would be unimaginable on the East Coast. Unfastened to Europe and the Modernist narrative, Los Angeles artists never shy away from having a really good time at the expense of any encumbering gravitas.

West Coast big shots Dahlia Danton and David Schoffman

I recently returned from one of my periodic grand tours of California and I was struck by one new artist in particular.

Julien Léthéens, a Belgian expatriate who has been living out there for the past several years, has ironically become the quintessential L.A. artist. His recent work, currently included in the MOCA exhibition Sense, Sensual, Sportif is such a bland regurgitation of everything from  Basquiat's graffitio, French Affichisme and Carpentier's paper bags that it all oddly works by the sheer force of its unapologetically derivative chutzpah.

Blind Drawings on the Hollywood Walk of Fame #16, Julien Léthées, 2014

Léthées apparently has a photographic memory for faces, or so the press releases claim. He can look at a person for just a few seconds and calmly render a perfect likeness without ever lifting his eye from the page. A talent better suited for Barnum and Baily than for the Beaubourg, in Los Angeles, a gimmick like that always has great currency.

Especially when its subject is celebrity.

What this Flemish phenom has been doing is parading down Hollywood's famous Walk of Fame with a small army of assistants and documentarians, setting up an easel and making blind contour portraits of each and every star underfoot.

He's got three galleries hawking these things and with his thespian good looks and sexy French accent he's got a pilot in production that according to Variety is "an unusual hybrid of high-art Discovery and low self-esteem Fox Reality."

And to think I could have stayed home and covered the Carl Andre retrospective.