One Night in LA...No, wait,...Two Nights in LA

By Laura Medina

Chinese Dancing Lions at LA Art Show's Opening Reception Party.

This culture vulture of a scribe remembered, many moons ago when first arriving here, attending the first and last of Los Angeles Art Basel in what was then the sketchy industrial section in Downtown Los Angeles' fartherest reaches.

The idea was lovely...the location was not. Holding an international art fair/marketplace was ten years too soon for the City of Angels to handle. This is why Miami Art Basel became Miami Art Basel with it's roomy but clean, cheap, and safe industrial warehouses ready to be loft galleries and happenings.

It was ten years in the making but it happened, the Los Angeles Art Show, an emerging art marketplace making its mark on the international art scene.

Let Manhattan Art Amory handle the Europeans during Winter's thraw. Allow Miami,the gateway to the Central and South America, cater to Latin America's aristocrats and nouveau riche with avant-garde tastes.

Being coined as "The New York of the West Coast," by Cavortress' Julie Wheat, Los Angeles is strategically placed as the link up between the rising Chinese Affluents and the City of Angels' thought-provoking and ground-breaking painters, sculptors, and mixed-media artists, growing a fresh and vital art market.

During that same night, at the other side of Downtown Los Angeles, a new type of market and happening occured...

When the Opening Ceremony commenced, it was time to split to Mr. Kevan Hall's Spring 2011 Collection Live Model Shoot, hosted in AGENDA LOFT.

Following in the grand tradition of Andy Warhol's The Factory of the Sixities and Halston as Disco Dandy in Seventies' SoHo, Kevan Hall, the Beverly Hills Society courtier designer, threw a different type of soiree for a new market of socialites.

LA's fierce fashion pack: LookbookLA's Felix Foto, Kevan Hall, & LAFashionSnob.com's Heather Petrey.

This may not be free-for-all as the LA Art Show but it was a privileged, intimate get-together in a wild and wooly setting.

When this pop culture intellectual of a scribe mentioned to Mr. Hall, that his trajectory from prim and proper high society couturier to downtown scenester is reminiscent of Halston, the White House milliner to Downtown Disco Dandy of the Swinging Seventies , he noted this was a way to shake things up.

This trend of revisiting Andy Warhol's The Factory's happenings as parties-cum-photoshoots-cum-film shoot, was rekindled by Urban Republic's Peter Rhima last Spring then picked up by Mr. Hall.

Perhaps, it is the "Gossip Girl" effect, living it up while dressing up.

Dancing in Edie Sedgewick's footsteps when Andy Warhol took her as his Factory muse, models styled up as Aaron Slims' debutantes, kicked up their heels then vogued and danced like there is no tomorrow.

It is funny that Mr. Hall's happening-as-live model shoot is right in the middle of Awards Season when the city's pretty young socialites and the entertainment industry's starlets are donning his and Sue Wong's more upscale creations for the red carpet.

Paraphasing an emerging Hollywood gentleman, Carlos Ramirez mentioned, as Young Hollywood rises up, the more they want to spruce up.

Just because one is strapped in a strapless bodice of a ballgown, it never means stiff.

Watching Mr. Hall's Pretty Young Things cutting loose in a downtown loft party amongst light bulb flashes prove you can still cut loose.

Partying it up in fancy frocks only proves one is fabulous.

Once Mr. Hall Live Model of a Party has became All Tomorrow's Party, it was time to fly back to LA Art Show's exclusive After-Party where deals are sealed between buyer and dealer between sips of St. Germaine elderberry champagne when outlaw graphic artist, Shepard Fairey spun tunes.

The real LA Art Show After-party did not happened until two nights later when it was open to the art-loving public and the wheeler-dealers who keep the art machinery grooving.

If the Opening Ceremony tries to copy Miami Art Basel, and the marketplace modeling itself on the Art Amory Show, then LA Art Show's Finale wants to follow in Charleston, South Carolina's Spoleto USA's footsteps in trotting out world-class performance art.

This is their way of doling out eye dessert after finishing the meal of making the deal and selling artwork at an international level.

Los Angeles' art devotees showed up with their children, making this a hipster's version of family night.

However, it did not disappoint...

The finale was the retro-Victorian, nightclub hit, and Cirque du Soliel veterans, the trapeze-swinging and acrobats, the Steben Twins.

Jaded art supporters goggly eyed and gasped as the sister duo swung, flipped, and twisted into contortions mid-air in the Cooper Building's Penthouse Loft.

The sinewy daring duo stunted their routine with aplomb and blithe.

Then following in Piccolo Spoleto's tradition, party-goers joined in with the modern intrepretative dance troupe of volunteer parents and their kids. In between, they became mimes and living sculptures-with wait staff handing out vegetarian Italian snacks and flourless brownies.

In the end, two events in one night then one last night, everyone lets their hair down.