"Art fairs aren't fair," criminally underrated Los Angeles painter Karen Carson quipped to me last Saturday, halfway through the city's annualesque descent into art-world multitasking known as Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Her remark, made in the midst — of all places — of a new show of Chuck Arnoldi's unrepentant 1980s abstractions at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, begged the obvious question, "But are they art?" As someone who tends to avoid even regular openings because of the kinesthetic and pheremonal interference generated by herds of desperate careerists, I was surprised to survive the weekend with a firm answer: Maybe.
 
With exponentially frantic circles of activity expanding around last weekend's fair to cap off the official "L.A. Arts Month," the horror vacuii of art events — extravaganza displays, special gallery programming across a dozen or so art scenes, unique performance events, fundraising auctions, video screenings, cocktail parties, and anti-censorship protests — takes on an almost transcendental sublimity, like surrendering to the overwhelming intricacy of a Persian rug or Bach cantata. Almost.
 
The trick seems to be staying slightly drunk for the entire month, or at least that's what I surmise from the more positive reports I've encountered. According to my own research, it's a useful strategy for squelching the more hysterical vibrations generated by an airplane hangar chock-full of post-boom denial. Admittedly, I had to focus on the actual Art Los Angeles Contemporary weekend due to a touchy case of the gout, but preliminary findings are hopeful.

Just in its second year, and with a major venue shift (from Hollywood's high-end dead mall Pacific Design Center to the cavernous Bergamot Station-adjacent Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport), the fair has generated unusually good buzz, especially for L.A., where regular attempts to galvanize the idiosyncratic local art juju into the boilerplate structure of other major art fairs have been falling flat for decades. Much of that is due to its range of participants, which, while including some well-established galleries like ACE Gallery, China Art Objects, and Suzanne Vielmetter, emphasizes artist-run spaces, quirky upstarts, and fly-by-night pop-ups — or at least the ones that can afford the rent.

What really set the fair apart (and may give it the edge over Art Platform Los Angeles, yet another fair, scheduled to coincide this fall with the Getty's massive, citywide "Pacific Standard Time" spectacle) is its conspicuous incorporation of consistently compelling live programming, with an emphasis on performance. Opening night featured dozens of Marnie Weber's ragtag monsters mingling with bemused (and slightly drunk) VIPs, courtesy of Emi Fontana's West of Rome enterprise.

The weekend was studded with inspired musical performances by the cutting-edge likes of Chris Johanson's Sun Foot, Lucky Dragons, Nowcloud, and Emily Lacy, while more unclassifiable performances curated by Chinatown collective Human Resources were showcased in a specially built amphitheater. There were even some cool interviews and panel discussions, which is normally an oxymoron. It almost seemed like the L.A. art scene might be animated by a coherent groundswell of DIY creative activity. If they could just get rid of all these people in cubicles trying to sell decorative artifacts for ridiculous sums of money, they might be on to something.