Building A Gallery: Hold Up Art
by Brian Lee
The first time I decided to go to the downtown L.A. art walk I was a junior in college. We spent at least a half hour scouring for parking up and down 5th and 6th Streets, ultimately parking on a sidewalk lined with tents full of homeless people. It reminded me of Black Friday at Best Buy. Though extremely sketched out to leave my car there, we hurried on with our night and made it out to this gallery on Spring Street where my buddy Eron was spinning. We grabbed drinks and began to take in the art. After about 10 minutes we got deathly bored of the student artists showing at this gallery and we moved on. One hour, six more galleries, and another twelve gulp-sized cups of wine later, we were ready to call it quits. Though leaving the scene incredibly disappointed with the quality of art, I was grateful to have actually taken some friends of mine out to an evening of art, something that happens rarely, if ever.
Looking back on my first night at the art walk (and having been back another eight times since), I can say I’m happy this whole hipster art scene is taking over downtown’s Gallery Row. Though the quality of art downtown is never on par with the Culver City district or Bergamot Station galleries, it is creating a sense of relevancy for art in our lives. Fine art is one of those things that can potentially exist in a silo, yet will still develop and grow. Whether it should is up to us: we have a choice to sit back and watch it develop on its own, or to participate in the dialogue.
Since that first night at the art walk I have worked for contemporary painter Justin Bua, and recently opened up an art space of my own in Little Tokyo, Hold Up Art (HUPA). My goal with HUPA is to create an art gallery that doesn’t feel like your average uptight L.A. gallery, but more like a clothing store (for lack of a more apt analogy): a place people can browse through, hang out, and talk about what’s up on the walls.
Ultimately who I am and what I believe in has little to do with why HUPA is here and why it is becoming a successful business. HUPA exists because of artists like Justin Bua. Not more than a year ago I was employed by Bua as an assistant of sorts; I did everything from cleaning dishes, posing for paintings (clothed), hanging gallery shows, and jump-starting his Facebook and viral marketing campaigns. Basically, his operations are so tight-knit, it was easy to see how a living-working artist (who is quite successful, I may add) dealt with getting his images to the public. Bua was smart in that in the ’90s he began to print posters of his art so fans who couldn’t afford his original paintings could still afford a reproduction and only have to spend $30. But what made Bua more relevant to his audience also alienated him from some fine art institutions. Therefore he had his poster world and his fine art world. The two never crossed, and he had to deal with them as such—two separate industries. After seeing this divide first-hand, I realized Bua couldn’t be the only artist out there with this dilemma. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands just in L.A.
Coupling this experience with the most amazing class I had ever taken—Museum Studies, taught by Selma Holo, director of the Fisher Museum at USC—I began to realize the value of audience relevancy to the art world. Holo cared about re-evaluating museums to create a new set of sustainable values on which they can be judged. These values extend beyond mere attendance numbers and take on elements of quality and experience. She even wrote a book, Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values; in it, a great collection of world museum leaders explain her new set of sustainable values and how they can be applied. What I took away from her class and many discussions was that if the institutions which display art are irrelevant to the public, whatever artwork they do show won’t matter. The irrelevant art will die off with the old money that started it all. If you take this and apply it to the private institutions that handle and work directly with the producers of contemporary art (i.e. the gallery world), you begin to see how relevancy—as a concept—is becoming a distant ideology that can only hope to be addressed.
HUPA developed in the image of what most private galleries in L.A. lack. Not only do we carry affordable art, which in many cases can be a signed silk-screen print for $20, we represent an artist like a brand. As he not only had the low-end posters, but also everything in between (mid-level silk screens, limited edition giclee canvas prints, and high-end originals), we took on Bua as the first artist. Along with Bua, we grabbed nine artists from Los Angeles and two from San Francisco and set out to get help the public to know these names. If people can remember their top five bands, actors, and fashion designers, why is it such a stretch to get fine art to a similar level of public relevance? Our goal is to get people to start remembering names of artists and their styles, and to truly form an opinion about whether or not they like it. For example, most people see Shepard Fairey and just believe that this is great art ... but that is my problem with the contemporary art world: people think that it is supposed to be over their heads.
I want people to follow their favorite artists’ careers, know when they are releasing a new print and see their exhibitions when they come around town. I look at HUPA as a stepping-stone, a beginning point to the commercialization of the fine art world. Though the commercialization process of an art form like music, for instance, may have come with sacrifices to the industry (*NSYNC, anyone?), it also led to things like the iPod and infinite access to content. A revolutionary change in art in exchange for a few crap stains in our memory. Though Fairey isn’t exactly 2D-art’s *NSYNC, and he may be pissing off a lot of talented painters and draftsmen, he’s opening people’s minds to the idea of consuming art. Before artists started producing limited editions and posters, the average person couldn’t expect to ever own an authentic art piece from a famous artist. Now that digital printing and scanning techniques are at such a high level of quality, it is becoming an art world standard. Old-school galleries that don’t embrace this new digital reproduction trend will ultimately get left behind, like much of the music industry is being in the era of MP3s. The climate of our contemporary art world today is such that affordable art is almost a necessity for many artists to stay connected and actually mean something to someone’s life.
Sonny Kay, “The Apocalypse Inside an Orange”
When I first began researching artists for HUPA I bought a Sonny Kay print, which was an album cover for The Omar Rodriguez Lopez Quintet’s The Apocalypse Inside an Orange, which happens to be my favorite album of recent memory. Basically a birthday present to myself, I took the print to the framers and went through what was soon to become my day job. The print is still hanging in my living room today. The impact of having a resonant print hanging in your home is on a similar level to finding your new favorite album; an album you can play from front to back on repeat for days on end. An album that sounds both nostalgic and new with every listen.
The importance of keeping art accessible and relevant goes further than just the way we present and sell it in HUPA: the value and faith we invest in it and our artists means something. All art has the capacity to affect our lives in radical and unexpected ways. When one day you think you’ve found meaning, the next you are just as lost as when you first began. Art acts as a constant in people’s lives; the painting may never change but your perspective changes as you grow older. Without these constants in our lives we won’t have a meter for how we change.
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