East Coast perspective on West Coast Cultural Elitism

Must read: Washington Post article about architectural differences and basically cultural snobbery between the OC and LA: Rhapsody in Orange County

The piece compares concert halls, architects (Pelli and Gehry) and the nouveau riche's insecurities and contributions to the art world.

Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

"Visitors from Los Angeles, the older and more glam neighbor to the north, scoffed with condescension...what would you expect from Orange County, an insufferably vulgar place of rich old men and trophy wives and idle youth bored with dropping C-notes in the Louis Vuitton shop? It's a wannabe place."

"But even if the two buildings are in different leagues, it's worth comparing them, and what they tell us about American cultural life. You might say that Pelli's [in the OC] hall and Gehry's hall [in LA] are bookends on a continuum of American cultural life. One building is an efficient space for a young orchestra, the other a destination venue for an institution that has effectively worked its way into the top ranks of American musical life. Pelli's hall marks an exuberant stage of naive youth, while Gehry's suggests the self-confidence of a cultural organization that has long outgrown the kind of civic bluster one heard in Orange County."

And let us not forget:
"Almost every institution in the rarefied world of American High Culture was built by exactly the same forces that have come together in Orange County's new concert hall: big bucks from the nouveau riche and a huge cultural inferiority complex."

Car culture turning up the need for architectural symbols:
"Orange County is building new cultural institutions because traffic has choked off its access to old ones."

All that being said:
"[While] Gehry hall, despite its dramatic exuberance, exudes a kind of Apollonian calm...Pelli's concert hall captures the energy and brusque pragmatism of art in the age of unsentimental capitalism."