Emulating its script, the fair itself unfolded as a site-specific theatre in which guests, gallerists, and artists promenaded between the works on view. The ensuing performance was equal parts decadent and mannered, aware of its own elaborate display. Cocktails went for $15 and Felix-themed beach balls filled the Roosevelt’s Hockney lagoon. A small camera crew tailed Jerry Saltz. Eric Andre and Hunter Biden were in attendance. And the party! The pool! The margaritas! If glamour—and all its painful self-consciousness—were a genre, this would be it.

"Singin’ in the Rain," one of the first films I ever saw, loomed over my thoughts during Frieze Los Angeles. In its second west coast iteration, the art fair took place at the historic Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood. Top tier galleries set up white box booths in a tent laden with plush carpet at the entrance — the color of the year was a deep pink. Smaller L.A. galleries and artist project spaces occupied the row in the back of the tent. It was what I imagine a convention to be like — fanatics selling wares and displaying their newest oddities in a big civic arena flooded with fluorescent light, albino lizards, and unique species of scorpions. This was an Art Expo, the World Fair.

Established in 1912, the Hollywood Art Center School was LA’s first independent art school and one of its best-kept secrets for decades. Tucked away within a serene four-acre 1920s Spanish garden and estate along Highland Avenue near the Hollywood Bowl, the school ceased operations in 2000. In its final years, the school was in a severe state of disrepair, the buildings and grounds beautifully decaying within the picturesque setting of the Hollywood Hills.  

In 1967, French filmmaker Agnes Varda landed in Los Angeles with “a suitcase of assumptions and judgments.” Varda liked to maintain her outsider insouciance and the three films she made in Southern California are packed with wry observations on the region’s daydreams and dissonance.