Of all the exhibitions in PST Art: Art & Science Collide, the $20m, Getty-funded initiative now wrapping up, the most ambitious in many ways was For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). The show told a story about visual art that emerges from physical pain and vulnerable bodies that defy social norms. It featured works by more than 80 artists from the 1960s through the Covid-19 years that reflected and shaped larger shifts in civil rights, feminism, queer rights and disability justice. Apart from one section on art made during the Aids crisis, this was not an exhibition we have seen before in any form—and it packed an emotional and intellectual punch.
Sadly, visitors this February to Frieze Los Angeles, the city’s biggest contemporary art event, were not able to drive down and see the show, which closed on 2 February. Nor could they see the small but potent—and prescient—retrospective of the late eco-artist Beatriz da Costa staged by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Nor the best technology show of the lot, Future Tense, an exploration of complex systems at the Beall Center in Irvine. All three of these shows finished their runs before Frieze brought a stream of gallerists, curators and collectors to the Los Angeles area.
If the festival model is not working to pull people in, can the Getty help send more shows on the road?
What is worse, none of these three shows is travelling to other institutions nationally or internationally. As a PST Art spokesperson confirmed, only seven of the initiative’s 72 exhibitions are travelling, a fact that raises basic questions about its broader purpose. What is the point of PST Art? Who is it really for? And why is it not reaching more people?
More specifically, is PST Art at heart an academic enterprise developed to fund new scholarship, or an exhibition extravaganza designed to drive cultural tourism, like California’s answer to the Venice Biennale?
When PST Art first launched in 2011 (under the tricky-to-google name Pacific Standard Time), Getty leaders had a sweeping vision, articulating at least three main goals. One, to generate scholarship on the artists and issues of particular importance to Southern California. Two, to boost Los Angeles’s reputation as a cultural capital. Three, to drive museum attendance and cultural tourism in the region.
There is little doubt now—14 years, around $50m in funding and one name-change later—that PST Art has been a success on the first two counts. Together, the first three editions of the initiative have produced 227 exhibitions at museums and nonprofits, and over half that many catalogues. (My own library of PST Art titles has grown from one shelf to seven.) The first edition alone helped revive the careers of artists such as Judy Chicago, Noah Purifoy, Senga Nengudi and Doug Wheeler.
Los Angeles’s reputation as an art capital has benefited as a result. According to an unpublished survey conducted by the Getty, which I was briefly given access to in 2012, around 14,000 museum visitors expressed a significantly higher opinion of Los Angeles after the first edition of PST Art. Before, 41% “strongly agreed” that Los Angeles has “world-renowned cultural institutions” and 48% “strongly agreed” it has “a diverse art and cultural scene”. Afterward, those numbers jumped to 57% and 62%, respectively. The initiative has been so successful from a marketing standpoint that cultural leaders in other cities—like San Francisco, with its recently announced Further Triennial—are exploring how to replicate it.
Looking ahead to 2030
But weirdly, while raising Los Angeles’s profile, PST Art has failed to demonstrably boost museum attendance or cultural tourism. Yes, puffy reports in 2012 from city agencies trumpet a spike in food and hotel spending. But when you drill down to look at the attendance figures, over 80% of visitors to PST exhibitions in the first edition were local, as usual. And for the majority of participating museums, including the Getty itself, attendance was flat or down during their first PST year. Since then, nobody has identified attendance as a goal.
This points to changes that current Getty leaders—and whoever assumes the newly created and much-needed job of “Head of PST Art“—should consider for its next edition, scheduled for 2030. First, they should move the opening week to February to better align with Frieze Los Angeles (assuming the fair still exists) and to avoid the jam-packed international art calendar in September (which can be counted on). The Getty should also stage some sort of PST Art teaser during the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles for maximum exposure. (Though please skip the aggro opening spectacle of Cai Guo-Qiang’s fireworks.)
At the same time, the Getty could offer a grant to each participating museum—or some packaging expertise, or both—to help them travel their shows. If the festival model is not working to pull people in to see the shows, can the Getty’s new Head of PST Art help send more shows on the road to reach more people?
A few important PST Art shows have travelled, like Now Dig This!, the survey of Black artists at the Hammer Museum that landed at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2012. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is smartly sending its show on Mesoamerican pigments to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City next year. But finding the right venues to accept a show (and assume shipping costs and fees) is not an easy process.
“Travelling a show is a lot of work,” says David Familian, the artistic director of the Beall Center. “As a smaller institution, we just don’t have the bandwidth to do that.” He imagines that the Getty could support the pitching process, helping to share promotional videos generated by each partner with museum leaders in other states or countries.
Jill Dawsey, the curator of For Dear Life at the MCASD, says she is now in discussion with two East Coast venues about creating a condensed version of her show, after trying unsuccessfully to tour the full show. “The Getty has been so effective at spurring collaboration among SoCal institutions,” she says. “I wonder if there’s a way they could support matchmaking with institutional partnerships across the country. Resource-sharing among institutions in exhibition-making and collection-building is definitely the way forward.”
Depending on the 2030 theme, to be announced later this year, one other model might work: the Getty could work to find a partner city to host an entire suite of shows. PST Art could land in Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin or wherever the upcoming theme would find a natural home—and finally travel well beyond its own time zone.
