The following is excerpted from an interview with Sayre Gomez at his studio on July 21, 2022, titled, “Is Los Angeles still an Artist’s City?” that was featured in The Baer Faxt City Guide to Los Angeles.
How has LA changed since you moved here?
The arts district used to look like Boyle Heights. It was vacant. Where Hauser & Wirth is now was just a weird abandoned building that people went in to do graffiti. But now there’s these beer gardens. On he one hand, it’s wack that all the charm is gone, but before it was just depressing vacant buildings and that’s not that charming either.
In the last ten years, LA has gone from a moderately affordable city to one of the most expensive cities in the world. All that real estate got bought up and it turned the city into this boutique space that caters to wealthy people. That’s part of a larger shift in the US economy. There’s no middle class, especially in a major metropolis. That’s all been pushed out, but you couldn't say it’s Hauser & Wirth’s fault.
What do you think has been the impact of that on artists?
If you’re young and just got out of college I think it would be exponentially harder than it was for me 15 years ago. But there’s also more opportunities—way more than there ever were when I first started.
It’s funny—I had started showing a little bit in Chicago and everybody said, “Yeah, it’s a great place to show but you’re never gonna sell anything—there’s no collectors here.” Then I was like, “Oh, but once I move to LA there will be collectors.” Then I got here, and everybody was like, “There's no collectors here.” And everybody said that for a long time. I was selling work, but a lot of the sales were going to Europe or New York.
I feel like there’s a lot of collectors here now. I think the smartphone opened up the floodgates to a whole new tier of collectors—24-year-olds, or collectors who only bought sneakers for 10 years and now they buy contemporary art. This is the home of celebrities, and it seems like more and more celebrities are into it. Maybe Jay-Z rapping about Murakami opened people’s eyes. It’s more mainstream than it’s ever been.
If you’re a young artist, you weigh your options. But it’s still between New York and LA, and LA is probably still easier.