Blowhard, Esq. writes:

When Sir Barken was recently in L.A. on a cultural tour for his daughter, we met up for a day so I could show them around downtown. Sure, LACMA and the Getty are fine, but the city has a relatively new landmark that is also essential — the Velveteria or, to go by its even more wonderful official name, the Velveteria Epicenter of Art Fighting Cultural Deprivation. Previously located in Portland, Oregon, this museum dedicated to black velvet paintings that’s now in a Chinatown storefront is one of the city’s great oddball attractions.

The main hall. This area is a mixture of musicians and cowboys. Parsons nicely tied them together. They are currently featuring a number of tiki-themed pieces. This section celebrates filmmakers and movie stars. More erotic than anything you’ll see at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Aztec slave princess. This motif is popular in nearby Olvera Street. California icons. The curators’ hand-written notes about the artists. Because I love Stanwyck. The Naked Lady Room. I’m a big fan of this gallery. This is probably racist so I shouldn’t have included it. The King deserves his own shrine. Of course there’s a Black Light Room. Pot smoke optional. The Patron Saint of Kitsch. Satan’s Bodyguards. Lowbrow and highbrow collide.

Co-owner and co-curator Caren Anderson chatted with us for a few minutes about the collection.

Some info about the collection. A little on the history of velvet paintings. A sampling of their collection, published by Chronicle Books.

A SoCal native and former psych nurse, Anderson lived with her partner-in-crime Carl Baldwin for thirty years in Portland but they were so sick of the dreary weather they decided to move back to L.A. She said they own up to 3,000 paintings of which about 600 are on display at any given time. She gleefully noted that the fine art world doesn’t think much of their velvet utopia. “They hate us,” she spat.

Which raises the inevitable question — “But, but…is it art?” Yeah, sure, why the heck not? Certainly not high art, but as folk/outsider art it’s hard to beat. It’s appreciable as pure kitsch but there’s also something sweetly direct about it, the black fuzziness providing a stark yet inviting background for people to gaze at their heroes and icons. You’d think that people who frequent the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art would appreciate playful work that challenges established norms, but I guess they like their daring, marginal art only after it’s been officially sanctioned. It’s one thing when elites spit in the eye of bourgeois propriety, but an entirely different case when grassroots art flies in the face of our cultural overlords.

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