LOS ANGELES

AT night, it’s bright enough to stop traffic. One minute cars are buzzing along Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea. The next they slow to a crawl, even though the stoplight is green. The attraction? An art installation consisting of some 200 salvaged cast-iron lampposts from the 1920s and ’30s arranged in formation at the new entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Come dusk, the lamps turn on and create a sort of flying carpet of light.

Chris Burden, the artist who created the installation, “Urban Light,” has compared his work to an open-air building, about the size of his studio. The museum’s director, Michael Govan, has compared it to the Parthenon. It is, in any event, art on the scale of architecture. And since its introduction last year, it has become a leading example of a type of public art growing more prominent in Los Angeles: art you don’t have to leave the comfort of your convertible to experience.

Although downtown Los Angeles still boasts the city’s densest concentration of traditional public art  the sort of sculpture that dresses up corporate lobbies and courtyards  less likely spots in the greater metropolitan area have become home to what one could call drive-by art. A casual tour shows that this art takes many forms, going well beyond the celebrated mural tradition long associated with the city.

Two years ago, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama planted a bed of overgrown, colorful fiberglass and ceramic tulips in a Beverly Hills park, visible from Santa Monica Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. Last year, the American artists Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger infiltrated the Sunset Strip among other locations with billboards (in Ms. Kruger’s case, a video billboard), temporarily inserting their works into a thicket of movie ads, marquees, placards and other signage. This winter, the New York artist Jacob Hashimoto unveiled an aluminum-tile, tapestrylike sculpture made for the facade of the Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, while the ubiquitous street artist Shepard Fairey created a huge mural of Lance Armstrong on the side of the Montalbán Theater in Los Angeles to kick off the cyclist’s coming Nike-sponsored benefit project with various A-list artists.