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Yesterday was another busy news day in California.

A historically wet winter helped officially end a more than seven-year drought, and fallout from the college admissions fraud investigation continued to spread: Students spurned by universities allegedly involved have begun to sue, saying they unwittingly participated in a process rigged against them.

[Here are answers to all your questions about the scandal.]

But today, we wanted to dig into the Los Angeles contemporary art scene. Jason Farago, a critic for The New York Times, recently made his way west for a piece exploring L.A.’s place in a global art ecosystem. He wrote about how he approached an expansive landscape:

It’s almost a rite of passage for a New York Times art critic to be sent to Los Angeles to take the temperature of the city’s museums and galleries, and to pronounce whether the second-largest city in America has “caught up” to our hometown. As long ago as 1956, one of my predecessors wrote that “spectacular myths hover with the smog over Los Angeles obscuring the considerable progress this city has made in terms of the arts during the last few years.”

So when my editor and I sat down to plan my recent story on contemporary art in Los Angeles, timed to the West Coast debut of London’s Frieze Art Fair, we set ourselves some ground rules. No clichés of L.A. as a dream factory of endless sunny days. No cooing over allegedly cheaper rent, which has become a myth of its own. Even the go-to jokes about traffic no longer made sense now that the New York subway has buckled into chronic dysfunction.