Inside L.A.'s art-world ascension

Three vital factors led to this transformation, our art critic writes in his last Times column.

- CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT ART CRITIC

EDWARD Ruscha's 1991 lithograph "The End."

Habits are hard to break. I quit smoking 40 years ago — on April 23, 1986 (not that I'm counting). It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.

Today is my final column for The Times. This habit has gone on even longer than the smoking one, which had been extra hard to give up because nicotine is an excellent aid to concentration when at the keyboard. I've been doing daily art journalism for 45 years — 36 of them at The Times, with 2,195 bylines — so I’m about to find out whether this quitting will also be hellish. I won’t stop writing, but the daily journalism thing is done.

Looking back, the transformation of the cultural life of Los Angeles during my journalism career has been extraordinary. When I started out, the size of the balkanized art community was small. Now it’s big. Or very big. A few signs of contraction have been glimpsed — a gallery closure here, a market slide there — but it won't ever be small again.

Sprawl is usually cast as an L.A. negative, but it was good for art. The horizontal city is just too big to fully gentrify; there was always another neighborhood where an artist could find studio space, or a gallery could open up shop. And they did.

It was daunting fun to write about, too, and I almost missed it.

In 1982 I was recruited by the New York Times to take the No. 2 spot on its influential art criticism desk. I didn’t want to go, given L.A.'s freewheeling art territory compared with imperial Manhattan. But for a journalist, being recruited by the New York Times is like being drafted: You don’t have much choice but to go. Happily for me, the executive editor at the time was notoriously homophobic, and when he learned that I was openly gay he put an immediate stop to the hire — just as my now-husband and I were about to sign an apartment lease.