Los Angeles, Getty Center, LACMA

Checking out the Getty Museum (photos)

Art weekend in LA is not for the casual museum goer. You have to get up at 6:30am on a Saturday to beat L.A. traffic, drive 2.5 hours without a rest stop, walk for 4 hours, avoid falling off balconies, share your hot dog and soda, eat at Mel's on Sunset Blvd and then do it again the next day. Both the Getty and LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) were fantastic and bigger and better than I imagined. The Getty's most interesting exhibit was "Oudry's Painted Menagerie"large scale oil paintings of exotic animals done in the 1730's by Jean Baptiste Oudry. And at LACMA I was totally blown away by the light compositions of Dan Flavin. I'd seen them as individual works in other museums before but as a full composition they're an immersive visual experience. When you go from one piece to another your vision literally changes and your color perception begins to do cartwheels. At one point as we went from one room to another I thought the lobby was pink. Then I looked away for a few moments, looked back, and the lobby was white.