LOS ANGELES—Movie industry insiders come out in droves for the Golden Globes in Beverly Hills, taking place this year on January 13, but in the two days before the ceremony, many may be spotted at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar Airport alongside culture buffs of a different variety. The occasion: the 17th edition of Photo LA, being held January 10 to 13. Fair founder and local gallerist Stephen Cohen will share the spotlight with 69 other galleries and dealers bringing everything from classic images by Edward Weston and Brassaï to daring contemporary fare. Among the latter are works by 30-something Netherlander Hellen van Meene, and Los Angeles–based Jill Greenberg, whose slick portrait of a polar bear, Untitled (Ursine), printed in an edition of seven, is selling for $5,500 at the booth of New York’s ClampArt Gallery.

The LA Art Show, which this year has been paired with the LA Fine Print Fair, moves into the Barker Hangar on January 24 and stays through the 27th, offering “five centuries of art” from 125 international galleries, including big players on the L.A. scene such as Gemini G.E.L. and Forum Gallery. Don’t miss the art collectors’ boot camp, during which Art+Auction contributing editor Jori Finkel coaches aspiring connoisseurs on how to buy with savvy.

The Pacific may beckon at this point, but there’s no rest for the weary art lover. From January 25 to 27, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium hosts the fourth edition of Art LA, and the buzz is it’s shaping up to be the best one yet. For corroboration one need only look at the gallery roster: 60 ultrahip operations (half of them local), including Peres Projects, of L.A. and Berlin; Tokyo’s Tomio Koyama Gallery; 1301PE, of Los Angeles; and the Paris- and Miami-based Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, which is showing the rainbow-colored geometric canvases of Paris- and Berlin-based Bernard Frize.

"SoCal Scene" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.