Dear Readers,

Suddenly, big is all around. Big, meaning huge spaces to create art in. Big, meaning large works to hang in gargantuan galleries. Big used to be considered vulgar but now it’s vogue. Big was garish, wasteful, decadent and dumb. Now it’s smart and assertive.

Lari Pittman—the artist I profile in this issue—has new paintings that are so big, he had to use the former Regen Projects gallery in West Hollywood for his temporary studio. Paul McCarthy is also featured in this issue, and he’s got to be the King of Big. His copious shows in New York this past summer occupied huge spaces all over Gotham.

On the surface, McCarthy and Pittman couldn’t be more different, but in some ways they are very much alike—both are guilty of excess with their art. Pittman crowds his canvases with images, textures, markings, color and a dizzying array of symbolism. McCarthy fills his sets with mounds of colorful messy 3D scenarios with the same sort of motifs: spurting penises, pooping anuses, blood and guts. McCarthy’s executions can come off cartoony; Pittman’s imagery can also. Both started out small, both are now big. And so is their art.

In the past, displaying this kind of work would have been problematic. Such massive art could only be seen in museums. Now Pittman can showcase his huge paintings in the cavernous new Regen Projects space on Santa Monica Boulevard. And McCarthy was able to exhibit his monstrous George W. Bush mechanical sculptures at the L&M gallery in Venice a few years back.

Los Angeles seems only too happy to accommodate this new big art. With the recent influx of East Coast galleries seeking large warehouse spaces in LA, our local galleries are looking toward bigger greener pastures as well. Staff writer Ezrha Jean Black maps it all out for us in her geographic survey of Los Angeles, telling us exactly who is moving into these larger spaces, and why. For New Yorkers, Los Angeles is still the Wild West in a lot of ways.

This new trend, where size trumps location, is something of a mystery to me. Some of these new LA galleries are practically in the hinterlands, relatively speaking. Galleries use to choose their location to be geographically convenient for their collectors. Is it possible there are helicopter landing pads on the roofs of these new loft spaces?

No matter. We all have cars in LA. Art matrons and patrons won’t stop their quest for good art. They will fly to fairs, faraway islands, new continents. And if it’s big, well that’s all the better. It all fits here in LA.