I missed the party. A party that promised nothing less than to reveal the nature of reality. I wanted to go, but the promised revelation of full reality was curtailed by immediate financial reality—I had to go to a wedding out of town the night before and couldn’t afford the only flight that would get me back in time for the event. I grudgingly accepted that I might be on too tight a budget to leave Plato’s Cave. And what did I miss? Reality was better than I could have guessed: A helicopter dropped a wooden crate from the sky and inside was a giant cake. Champagne—bottles floated on a sea of sculpted ice in a fountain—never stopped flowing, dispensed by waiters wearing crisp white frocks. An orchestra of cellists played Bach on the veranda of a neoclassical Beverly Hills mansion, and the music floated across a sprawling lawn where art world bona fides mingled with Vegas-esque dancers and, inexplicably, a large herd of live goats. A banner spread across the topiary read: Think Harder.
The party, thrown by the conceptual sculptor Piero Golia, honored the 20th anniversary of the Mountain School of Arts, an LA arts institution that you’ve probably never heard of unless you are connected to the global whisper network of MSA-affiliated artists, a relatively small cohort in number (just over 300 people have attended Mountain School over the course of 20 years) but one with outsized influence in the cloistered art world. The school counts among its alumni well-known figures such as artists Jordan Wolfson, Noah Davis, and Ida Ekblad, as well as more difficult to categorize creative notables, such as the musician/curator Wendy Yao. The list of teachers likewise reads like a who’s who of the past fifty years of contemporary art: Paul McCarthy, Dan Graham, Albert Oehlen, Simone Forti, Laura Owens, Pierre Huyghe, Chris Kraus, Jim Shaw, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sterling Ruby, and Frances Stark, to name a few. But the school does not advertise the notoriety of its students and teachers, because it doesn’t advertise at all. It doesn’t even have an especially functional website.
Mountain School—so called because it was founded in 2005 in a spare room of the now-defunct “Mountain Bar” in Chinatown—also has no campus and no set schedule. It boasts no paid faculty, grants no degrees, and costs nothing to attend. There is only one course of study available, which is something along the lines of “how to be an artist,” but the contours of that study might include “how to find the best rooftop in Los Angeles,” or “how to observe the moon,” or “how to cook an edible meal for a group of peers.” There is an admissions process: The school accepts twelve students every year out of a sizable pool of applicants, most of whom find out about the school from other attendees. It could be argued that Mountain School is mostly a school in the sense that its participants identify as students and afterwards go on to consider themselves a part of a shared legacy of alumni. This perception of belonging is what Golia described to me as “the creation of a very high level of reality,” the essence of which would be best witnessed at this really fucking awesome party.
A few weeks earlier, I’d sat with Golia on the back porch of his modest Hollywood Hills house, watching the sun slide down the San Gabriel Mountains while he chain-smoked and talked to me about Mountain School. Golia, who is bald and bearded, has the monkish appearance of a true believer, a supplicant in streetwear. His preferred mode of communication is the propositional anecdote (“Suppose we were to…”), and his manner is co-conspiratorial. He punctuates nearly every sentence with the word “fuck” or “fucking” deployed in a rich Neapolitan accent (so rich that he once gave a quote to a journalist about “chaos” and the journalist reported him speaking about “cows.” Golia: “Why would I be talking about fucking cows??”). Speaking with him, I felt immediately and implicitly trusted, though he assured me throughout the conversation that he didn’t trust me at all.
The origin story of Mountain School is thus: Twenty years ago, Golia and an artist friend, Eric Wesley, had the idea to found a school where, in a casual setting, artists could get together and share what they were thinking about. They wanted to bring restless minds together, free of agenda, heavy-handed pedagogy, or financial burden. The framing as a “school” rather than a salon or collective suggested the terms of engagement: those who came should come to learn. Introducing it as a school also represented a rebellion against—or an addendum to—Southern California’s prestigious tradition of arts education, the behemoths of CalArts, UCLA, and ArtCenter. By 2005, these former bastions of the avant-garde had started to feel less like the fringe and more like respectable professional institutions that fed a profitable industry.
If you weren’t in Los Angeles and a part of the art world prior to the 21st century (I wasn’t), it can be hard to understand the temperature change that happened in the early aughts. Before the financialization of contemporary art in the 2000s—the moment when global capitalism alchemized art objects into tokens that could be used to hoard and transfer wealth across international borders—the art scene in Los Angeles revolved around its schools. Famous Angeleno artists like Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden didn’t accumulate wealth in gated mansions; they taught college. At a place like UCLA, the spirit was experimental and the terms serious. A telling anecdote: A fifty-something painter, educated in LA in the 1990s, told me he’d once been afraid to show his graduate professor a conventional landscape painting, worried the professor might actually punch him. But somewhere around the millennium, the LA scene started to interface with an international art market, and things changed. Many of Los Angeles’s most successful gallerists of the past twenty years—dealers like David Kordansky and Tim Blum—got their start in this period, riding a wave that brought wealth and renown. Meanwhile, at the institutions, an MFA slowly became less of an eccentric pursuit and more of a stamp of professionalism (aspiring landscape painters no longer needed to fear physical violence; such paintings now sold!). The generation of Angeleno artist-educators that included McCarthy and Burden left their faculty positions; the intellectual consensus was that the city’s backbone art schools were in freefall.
Golia—who arrived from Naples by way of New York City in 2002 with three-quarters of a chemical engineering degree and no formal art credentials—had quickly found a place in this community of serious Los Angeles conceptual artists. When Golia first moved to Los Angeles, he made and sent personal calling cards with his name on them to the artists he admired. “To me, it was the idea that you come to a new place and politely introduce yourself,” he told Gagosian Quarterly in 2019. Golia was not a famous artist by any means—he’d had a couple solo shows in Italy and New York, a fledgling career creating a mix of performances, sculptures, parties, and uncategorizable actions—but he had a deep appreciation for his forbears and passion for a certain trajectory of modern and contemporary art. He could talk Beuys, Boetti, Burden, and Baldessari all day. The funny thing about the art world in Los Angeles in 2005 was that “talking John Baldessari” sometimes meant talking to John Baldessari. According to Andrew Berardini, a longtime LA art writer and Mountain School teacher: “You could be a nobody from nowhere and show up and just start talking to people, and especially if you were a fellow artist, they would engage back. Maybe because they’d taught school for so many years, this was a generation that was very open to intergenerational contact in a way you don’t see today.” Golia made friends, both of the older generation and his own. He hung out with peers like Wesley, Richard Jackson, and Henry Taylor at the bars in Chinatown near the neighborhood’s cluster of young galleries, waxing poetic late into the night about art.
Golia and his friends saw the commercial shift in art world attitude as a threat to their beliefs. They had become artists to make work that had content. They believed art should not be solely decorative, but actually important—capable of telling the truth, of reshaping the world. It might seem funny to pursue truth in a city obsessed with fiction, but Golia is Napoletano, the city that gave us the commedia dell’arte. His own practice over the years has included acts such as melting down his car into the shape of a unicorn, installing a glowing orb above the Standard Hotel that lights up only when Golia is in town, sculpting the nose of George Washington, and running a makeshift social club called Chalet Hollywood. He reportedly once climbed a palm tree at Art Basel Miami and refused to come down until his piece sold. He is fond of the Boetti quote, “The artist is something between a shaman and a showman.” He was captivated by the possibility of Los Angeles and the magic of its fictions. “LA is like la Légion étrangère—like the French Foreign Legion,” said Golia. “When you fuck up everywhere else, you come back here and you change your name.”
It seemed the perfect place to start a school, especially if you had no money or experience starting schools.
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The first Mountain School class met once a week over the course of three months and was open to whoever wanted to come. Golia and Wesley did actually advertise that first year by posting xeroxed signs to bulletin boards around Chinatown. The first year was a simple open series of readings. Franz Ackerman, Christian Jankowski, Dan Graham, and Annika Larson read to whoever showed up. The classes were simple, but popular with the Chinatown set, and later that year, the writer Frances Stark wrote a wide-ranging article on the decline of Los Angeles art education for Artforum. In the piece, she mentioned Golia and Wesley’s young school, characterizing it as an exciting alternative. Overnight, the school gained national attention. In response to this new spotlight, the schoolmasters created a more formalized structure for the second year, creating an application and inviting fifteen artists to closed sessions taught by artists like McCarthy, Jackson, and many others. If students came from out of town, Golia found donated free housing for them, asking friends for spare bedrooms and unused studios. He and Wesley tapped the artists and intellectuals they knew to hold new varieties of classes, not only on their art practices, but on subjects as disparate as physics and law. The art collector John Morace ended up involved with the school after the sculptor Jorge Pardo mentioned to Morace that the school was holding a class about Mannerism. “I actually happen to own a Mannerist painting,” Morace told Pardo. “I’ll just bring it.” He took his painting off the wall and brought it to the bar and has been teaching at Mountain School ever since.
In the two decades since the first sessions of Mountain School, the school has grown in scope but not in scale. Class sizes remain small, and Golia has continued to invite a wide range of people to teach on an even broader range of subjects. The school has welcomed architects and curators, collectors, biologists, restaurateurs and chefs, the heads of fashion brands, and art world antagonists like Stefan Simchowitz. The Vogue editor Lisa Love used to teach a class. One artist who has never taught at Mountain School is Golia himself, who prefers to remain behind the curtain as the school’s wizard-like facilitator. (In 2010, co-founder Eric Wesley moved on to other projects. Golia: “Eric was smart. I am the idiot who wants to run a school.”) Golia’s formula for who to invite is a mix of who he can lean on for a favor and who he thinks is compelling: “It is not that every year, everybody we invite to Mountain School, I would sell my house to buy their shit,” said Golia. “No. Some people I disagree with, but I do believe that it is very important that some of them disagree with you.” The results of Golia’s approach can be hard to quantify, but anecdotal evidence exists to point towards the results of this method of placing students amongst people they might not strictly like. One example: The LA guerrilla radio station KCHUNG got its start when an MSA student, Simon Bothwell, attended a class taught by a public radio producer and came away with the idea that public radio functioned terribly and that LA might need a new—better—radio station. The idea stuck.
The core of the Mountain School pedagogy is simple. The purpose is to introduce students to what contemporary art looks like in the actual city of Los Angeles, California. Students figure out where they want to fit in this art world; what they want to support and what they want to fight against. What stands out most about this straightforward approach is how rare it is in the world of art education. At a standard art graduate school in 2025, students might pay $200,000 over the course of two or three years to read texts about the history of the modern canon, while workshopping their own artists’ statements in preparation to enter “the real world.” They might attend lectures by a few visiting artists. At Mountain School, a select group of students gets to eat dinner and talk openly with some of the most notable working artists in the world, for free. The focus is not on artistic output or statements or even career in a formal sense—instead, it is about art as a collective and fundamentally social undertaking. In this way, Mountain School fights the atomization and focus on individual achievement so often found in traditional art education. The ideal outcome of school, in Golia’s mind, should be relationships.
There is no “normal” day at Mountain School, but there is a basic structure. The program, condensed from its original three months, now runs for two and a half intensive weeks. Out of town students now live together in housing Golia secures for them, either by getting the housing donated by a wealthy friend or—if that fails—paying for a place himself. (Golia: “If I find the place for free, it is a mansion in Malibu. When I pay, it is an Airbnb in Koreatown with 20 people in one bedroom.”) Mountain Bar closed in 2012, and the school is now itinerant. Each morning, local students join the out-of-towners at the house, and the group travels to their first “class” via rented minivan.
My first glimpse of Mountain School in action included this minivan. Loitering in front of a coffee shop in the Arts District on a bright Saturday in mid-September, I watched a group exodus from the oblong white vehicle. It is rare to see adults traveling together in a van outside of church groups and rehabs, and I wasn’t sure which trope the Mountain School cohort resembled more. Was this a particularly religious group of tattooed baristas, or a particularly fashionable group of recovering addicts? While a bit clunky, the van’s function is at once practical (everyone arrives at the same time) and spiritual. Traveling together, individuals transform into a crew. Revelations and questions can be shared en route to each destination, the details of which are not revealed to students until the day of. The size of the school is also at least partially determined by the vehicle’s constraints: a van big enough to shuttle twelve students and two or three teachers is within budget; any more and Golia would have had to get a Mercedes Sprinter—out of reach. Said Tristan Rogers, a poet and alum of the school’s early years who periodically travels to LA from Cornwall, England, to serve as MSA administrative support and driver: “So much of the magic of the school is about the experience of being part of a kind of social group…Fourteen people crammed into a van is not necessarily the most luxurious way to travel. But I think it’s quite distinctive.”
When I joined the students on the sidewalk, the cohort took my presence at face value. I met them about halfway through the school’s 2025 session. Perhaps, by that point, they were used to surprises. Golia withholds information about the school’s schedule partially to keep students as open as possible and partially because he balances so many moving pieces that he often doesn’t know the schedule himself until the day before. To make the school run, Golia trades favors for favors in a complicated art-world gift economy that would beguile even the most seasoned economic anthropologist. He once recounted a story to Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula magazine exemplifpubliying the complexities of this process: According to Golia, the artist Dan Graham taught at Mountain School on the condition that, “every time, we had to take him to see a new architecturally important home. At one moment, he was in a John Lautner period. I remember that I was so desperate, because I had burned all my Lautner connections.” To solve the problem, Golia called Richard Jackson, who told him to call Dagny Corcoran, the late Los Angeles book-seller who knew “everyone in town.” Dagny made a connection for Golia with the owner of a particularly important Lautner house, and Dan Graham agreed to teach. (Golia: “I am not good at understanding human emotions, but I can solve a problem. If you are ever stranded in Thailand without a passport, I am the guy who can get you out.”) The nature of each of these carefully-wrought classes depends entirely on the volunteer teachers. Some classes might be structured more like a workshop, whereas others might resemble a lecture, a seminar, or a tour. On the menu for the day I joined: a tour of the Corita Art Center and the Tom of Finland House. Afterwards, the group headed to John Morace’s home for dinner and to hear a talk by the cultural theorist and academic Catherine Liu. I was not invited to dinner.
Considering the school’s mystique, what was most surprising about my brief Mountain School experience (the two tours and a rushed bowl of pho in Silver Lake) was how much it felt like going on a normal field trip with a bright group of college students. Albeit one of the most international groups imaginable—this year’s class included a skater from Rome, an expatriated upstate New Yorker living in the Netherlands, a Finnish artist working in Paris, a curator based in Omaha, and an Angeleno who’d studied forestry in Ireland, among other résumés. Or maybe it felt more like a summer camp for the gifted and talented. The MSA group clearly had inside jokes, an established group dynamic, and mutual trust, and it was easy to imagine that in a few weeks’ time there would be tears and promises to keep in touch. Students don’t submit art portfolios to qualify for MSA; they simply describe themselves. The school once published a hardbound book of all the applications ever submitted to the school, successful and unsuccessful, because it seemed like good reading. Golia, along with a few helpers, tries to identify people who are “highly mentally active” and whose presences would complement each other, though Golia confessed that he has trouble saying no to anyone and, in recent years, has deferred much of the admissions process to others.
Between art stops, I requested to ride with the group in the minivan with this year’s highly mentally active group, and found the conversation was by equal turns casual (one student, scrolling her phone, asked, “Does anyone know what virtue hoarding is?”) and personal. An artist from Bologna told me that he’d applied to the school 15 times out of admiration for Golia’s art, which played a role in the student devoting himself to a life of the mind. “If I could not pursue a life of reading and learning, I would be dead,” he said as the minivan inched down Sunset Boulevard.
The tours themselves, while not wildly different from what you might imagine, also felt more intimate than your usual college class fare. Our guides at both the Corita Art Center and the Tom of Finland House shared details not only about the surface levels of their institutions but about the complications of running foundations based around the legacies of a single artist. An unspoken question guided: What does it actually take to make something happen? Each tour included a few quirks and divulgences reserved for MSA students. At one point, Sharp, one of the curators and caretakers at the Tom of Finland House, produced a box of rocks from a secret cabinet. “I don’t often get these out,” he said. “But these rocks are from outer space. You can hold them.” We passed the space rocks down the line, understanding ourselves
to be blessed.
What I know about other years, I’ve learned in scraps from conversations with alumni spread across the globe. Peter Tomka, a Los Angeles–based photographer and alum of the school from 2022, attended a year of the school housed in The Beverly House, an empty mansion that once also hosted JFK and Jacqueline Onassis on their honeymoon (The billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen, a patron of Golia’s work and owner of the house, offered an unused wing to students for a couple years while the mansion was under renovation.) Due to time constraints, few people actually make art while at Mountain School, but Tomka woke up pre-dawn to make a series of photos with a friend in the mansion’s pool, loosely based on the JFK honeymoon photos. His friend, Laura Tinard, a writer working on a novel about a failed artistic collaboration, promised to write the photoshoot into her novel. Later, during an on-site visit from a performance art group, Tomka decided spontaneously to jump into the same pool fully clothed. “I thought it might shake something up,” said Tomka. That year, the out-of-towners slept in makeshift IKEA beds, rapidly assembled in the empty rooms, and brushed their teeth in bathrooms fitted for heads of state.
This thread of mind-expanding Los Angeles postmodernism is not purely architectural but deeply embedded in the curriculum. Tristan Rogers, who had no exposure to Los Angeles or the art world prior to Mountain School, recounted his experience taking a dance class with Simone Forti, the seminal postmodern dancer: “I would put myself in the category of being pretty self-conscious when it comes to dancing. I wouldn’t usually get involved. But she would have these beautiful, magical, poetic afternoons where we’d do exercises and perform these little simple works together… It opened my eyes to the possibility of what art could be.” I saw pictures of this workshop, of students lying prone on a green lawn, which, in combination with so many rapturous anecdotes, did make me start to wonder if Mountain School is a bit of a cult. But with no huge time commitment and no cost (it isn’t even an official nonprofit) and a charismatic leader who prefers to remain behind the scenes, I couldn’t work out what sort of cult it would be.
Also, things don’t always go so smoothly. Sometimes it is crowded, or hot, or the group dynamic is off, or plans fall through, or people sleep uncomfortably in too-small hotel rooms in Joshua Tree on the school’s annual trip to visit the artist Andrea Zittel in the desert. In 2017, the year that the school was hosted in the Airbnb in Koreatown, Golia invited the noise rock band No Age to play a show. But before the band had even finished warming up, a neighbor showed up to let Golia know she’d called the police. (Golia: “Fuck you! You could have come to me and I would have fixed it, and instead you call the fucking police?”)
The No Age show was canceled, but a few years later, when they had the Beverly Mansion at their disposal, Golia invited the band back. “Now you can play as loud as you fucking want,” he told them.
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At the anniversary party that I missed, Berardini performed a Pierre Huyghe conceptual artwork called The Public Writer. Seated on a raised porch at the edge of the party, equipped with a laptop and a folding table, he wrote a live transcription of the events as they unfolded around him, dutifully noting in the pages as partygoers came over to say hi to him and offer to fetch him champagne. I must rely on Berardini’s text and eyewitness accounts to confirm that the pink cake with a giant frosted cherry on top really did descend from the sky, and that when it arrived the assembled really did scream, “Bravo Piero! Piero, Piero, Piero!” and Golia reportedly declared, in response, “I paid seven and a half million dollars for this!”
I also must rely on Berardini’s pages that the caretaker of the tribe of goats chastised them away from eating the precious hedge (“Dottie, you stubborn, stubborn goat,” she’s quoted as saying), that Paul McCarthy was heard muttering “tits up” (this sounds true to me), and Simon Bothwell, awed and perhaps a bit alienated by the spectacle, made the comment that, “This is ridiculous. This is what the Midwest must imagine we do.”
Indeed, as I reported this story about Mountain School of Arts, I found it difficult to picture how I would explain the anticapitalist spirit of this mansion garden art party—a party attended by at least one confirmed billionaire—to my friend who earns $40,000 as a public librarian in my hometown of Memphis and spends her days fending off semi-violent public masturbators. “The Beverly Hills garden party is fighting the system,” I would tell her, and hope that she didn’t try and kill me with a gun for being both an idiot and a class traitor. The truth is that, yes, while Mountain School is free, it operates on the back of a city that runs on excess, in an industry that was at least partially invented to hoard wealth. In 20 years, the Los Angeles art world that Golia and his peers existed on the fringes of in 2005 has grown into something of a parody of itself, a rather unfunny joke that seems to be on all of us. Golia—an artist who never wanted to be commercial, but whose career has grown alongside Mountain School—is now represented by Gagosian. He told Artillery that, unlike many of his peers, he has not grown rich from his art. (When I asked via email how he managed to swing the champagne and helicopters, he demurred and sent me a video of Willy Wonka. “Truth is, I spent the last 20 years to build a place where money is not the currency,” he wrote. Take from that what you will.)
When we spoke in person, Golia acknowledged the tension between his free culture ideals and the extravagance of the world in which he operates. He told me, “I really believe that I am the one who failed the most. I am here telling you that we don’t give a fuck about money and what counts is people, and look where we end up.” He gestured towards the Hollywood sign—the chic mansions stair-stepping down the Hollywood Hills. “I should jump off the balcony!”
I asked Golia if he’d ever had a dark night of the soul about the potential of art, given the shape of the world. “No,” he replied. “I am an engineer. I do believe in artists very, very much. I really think artists are special people. The darkness of the world doesn’t come from the artists. Today, we are living in a really dark moment. But the artists, they have always been the social avant-garde… think about Leonardo da Vinci. You need these big minds that shake the world.”
Golia told me that he’s never wanted money; he wants glory. “Where I come from,” he said, “glory and money—they don’t stand on the same balcony.” But even for a man who wants glory, Golia seems strikingly content to place others first, to do whatever it takes to get the idea out into the world. The evidence that he does it for his ideals lies in the fact that Mountain School is still running twenty years on—rare for an experimental institution. The list of alternative schools founded to rewrite what education can be runs long. The list of ones that made it to twenty years is much shorter.
Rogers, an observer of the school for many years, explained it in this way: “People used to continually ask Piero whether Mountain School was an art piece. He was always at pains to explain that, no, this was a proper school—a pedagogical institution, not some kind of stunt or artwork in that sense. Had it been, it might have continued for a bit but eventually run its course. I think the key is that there was a real intention for it to take itself seriously as an institution, not as a temporary or performative thing. It has probably outlived a lot of people’s expectations.
“I think, initially, part of the thing was that it was trying to do something impossible. Of course you can’t start a school—what are you talking about? But it kind of proved that it was possible. Everyone thought it wouldn’t continue, but hey—actually, it did.”
And have Golia’s goals for Mountain School shifted in the twenty years of doing the impossible?
“No,” Golia insisted to me on his porch. “I passed fifty years [of age]. I don’t want anything anymore. You know how many times at the end of Mountain School I was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck, this is the last time?’ And then you know what—these motherfuckers start applying. There is no application on the website. But they would send it anyway, and at that time, if they want to come, you can’t tell them no. So then, ‘let’s do it next year, next year, next year.’ Now we are at 20 years.” He sighed.
Golia knows he won’t be doing this forever, and his ideas about the legacy of the school feel oddly aligned with his engineering background. Rather than any particular plan for succession, he hopes that what he is doing will simply work, that the ideas about community and generosity will become real in the world, ideally without the school itself as a machine for creating them. The impossible feat: to make us fish forget that we swim in water. Unless it isn’t. When I asked the handful of Mountain School alums and teachers I interviewed how the school had changed their art practices, many found the question difficult to answer. All of them, however, said the school shifted their sense of personal agency—not just in making art, but in forming relationships. Witnessing the generosity of Golia and those who teach at Mountain School made the students more generous and less passive in their own lives.
“School is the place to make friends,” Golia has said. The world is the place to keep them. In a day and age when reality seems more often shifted by mass randomized violence than anything as precious as an idea, this strikes me as an incredibly hopeful outcome. I, too, can see Golia’s mountain.
