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Regis Philbin has sold his Greenwich, Conn., home for $3 million, according to public records.

Regis Philbin has sold his Greenwich, Conn. home for $3 million. It originally came on the market in 2008 for $5.9 million. The 6,000-square-foot home has a tennis court, swimming pool and a gazebo. Candace Jackson has details on The News Hub.

The home was most recently listed for $3.8 million. It originally came on the market in 2008 for $5.9 million, but Mr. Philbin decided to rent the home for a couple of years because of the slow real-estate market. He relisted it last year.

Mr. Philbin and his wife, Joy, purchased the home 20 years ago from a friend, sports broadcaster Warner Wolf. On more than six acres, the 6,000-square-foot Colonial and French-style home has four bedrooms and eight bathrooms. The home also has a tennis court, pool and a gazebo.

Mr. Philbin, whose television career has spanned more than 50 years, recently retired as co-host of “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

The Philbins purchased another home nearby about three years ago and also have a home in New York. A representative for Mr. Philbin didn’t respond to requests for comment. Michele Klosson of Sotheby’s International Realty had the listing.

Aspen Property Lists for $8.5 Million

The Aspen, Colo., property of Dale Launer, the Hollywood screenwriter who wrote “My Cousin Vinny” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” has listed for $8.5 million.

According to public records, Mr. Launer bought the 8-acre property in 1989 for $1.4 million. He combined two adjacent parcels to create a secluded compound in the Conundrum Valley, which is five miles from Aspen’s downtown ski-area.

The Aspen property of Dale Launer, the Hollywood screenwriter who penned “My Cousin Vinny” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” has listed for $8.5 million. Candace Jackson has details on The News Hub.

Bordered by Castle Creek with views of Aspen’s red cliffs, the property has a three-bedroom, 2,570-square-foot cabin and a three-bedroom, 1,232-square-foot guesthouse. It also has a private pond and a gazebo. Mr. Launer got approvals from the county for a 10,750-square-foot residence to be built on the land.

The veteran writer and producer, whose primary residence is in Santa Monica, Calif., used the Aspen property as a vacation home but says he’s now selling it because he wants to travel more. Andrew Ernemann of BJ Adams & Co. in Aspen has the listing.

Long Island Estate Lists for $22.5 Million

A Centre Island, N.Y., estate has listed for $22.5 million. The seller is Richard Cohen, one of the world’s largest collectors of early-19th-century porcelain.

A Centre Island, N.Y. 16,500-square-foot waterfront estate has listed for $22.5 million. The seller is Richard Cohen, one of the world’s largest collectors of early-19th Century porcelain. Candace Jackson has details on The News Hub.

Completed in 2006 and modeled after the Petit Trianon in Versailles, the 16,500-square-foot waterfront home is on just under 6 acres on Long Island, about 35 miles outside New York City. There are eight bedrooms and 12 bathrooms, and a movie theater with a kitchen on the third floor.

Mr. Cohen says his late father, one of the founders of commercial real-estate development and management firm Cohen Brothers Realty Corp., gave the home to him as a gift. Mr. Cohen, 54, says it took about 15 years to build the home.

He says he is selling because he’s looking to relocate. Laura Zambratto and Debra Petkanas, Sotheby’s International Realty, have the listing.

—Candace Jackson and Lauren A. E. Schuker—Email: privateproperties@wsj.com

By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS

Malibu, Calif.

A number of recent scholars and scholarly exhibitions have studied the rebirth of classicism in European modernist art produced in the years and wake of World War I. Many have argued that the radical figurative art of this period, marked by monumental forms, fluid line, ordered compositions and frequent evocations of a mythic, Mediterranean arcadia, can be aligned with the era’s bourgeois conservatism, reactionary politics and, at its darkest, the rising specter of totalitarian regimes.

In a provocative and demanding new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Villa, itself a pristine reproduction of an ancient artifact and ideal setting in which to contemplate the relevance of classical art in the modern world, Christopher Green of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Jens M. Daehner, a Getty curator of antiquities, have revisited and crucially revamped this well-trodden critical terrain. By juxtaposing the work of four profoundly disparate artists—Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia—with a selection of ancient artworks, all but one of the latter from the Getty’s collection, they compel us to reconsider in the broadest possible terms the appeal of classicism in an age when it was not only an abiding aesthetic and political force but a living phenomenon that demanded modern reinvention.

The exhibition is organized by theme, rather than chronologically, and studiously avoids pedantic pairings that might suggest definitive sources or direct comparisons between old and new. Instead, galleries such as that devoted to “Myths and Stories” brilliantly capture the dialogue across centuries that allowed modern artists to imagine redolent new contexts for classical art. In such dreamlike, revelatory images as “The Soothsayer’s Recompense” (1913), for example, de Chirico creates a haunting, modern locale for his painted evocation of the “Sleeping Ariadne,” one of the most renowned sculptural remnants of antiquity (de Chirico knew life-size depictions in Italy of the mythic, abandoned nymph, not the smaller figure here on view). Betraying none of the original narrative and only the most streamlined, modern vision of a classical arcade and deserted, raking piazza, de Chirico’s painting and especially his Ariadne, frozen in stony silence, powerfully convey the wistful, elegiac aura that the memory of the antique could summon in a contemporary setting.

Picasso, too, evoked the presence of classical sculpture in his painting, though usually in more emphatic and accessible terms. In such monumental, immobile figures as “The Source” (1921), a massively conceived and thickly painted reclining river goddess, the artist stages, as Mr. Green astutely argues, a sculpture vivante against a scrimlike landscape, and, in her far-from-elegant form and overtly theatrical space, exploits the artifice and inauthenticity of a static, classical ideal as reimagined in his work.

Any hint of parodic critique disappears, however, in Picasso’s lyrical, neoclassical drawings from the 1920s that explore the timeless virtues of classical line and form. In a connecting corridor in the exhibition, entitled “Graphic Mythologies,” his “Nessus and Dejanira” (1920), for example, is aligned with painted red-figured and white-ground Greek funerary jars and an incised, bronze Etruscan mirror to show how the subtle economy of means that marked Picasso’s invigorated and elegant new linear style owed as much to the classical past as did his painted evocations of ancient sculptures.

Picabia’s strange, decorative paintings, known as “transparencies,” hang in several of the exhibition’s galleries, and offer far more literal quotations from a past the artist refused to reinvent. With large, overlaid outlines of recognizable ancient and renaissance forms and stubbornly opaque subjects, they critique, as Picabia himself suggested, what he saw as the counterfeit classicism of his peers. One of them, the “Adam and Eve” of 1931, is exhibited near ancient Greek drinking vessels. Known as “eye cups,” they feature, as does the later painting, large staring eyes, and perhaps, the curators venture, an uncanny shared fascination with the mesmerizing power of the gaze.

Throughout the exhibition, the thoughtful array of selected antiquities and early-20th-century works also makes clear how indelibly our vision of ancient art has been shaped by modern artists. The missing limbs and head of the unrestored, Roman “Torso of a Draped Female” seem utterly dispensable when the sculpture is seen in the company of “The Poet’s Anguish” (1914-15), one of many enigmatic paintings in which de Chirico crowns an armless classical statue with a metaphysical mannequin’s head. To modern eyes, the focus on the beautifully articulated classical “Torso” is thoroughly of a piece not only with de Chirico but, as Mr. Daehner has suggested, with the most forceful, fragmentary sculptures of Auguste Rodin.

In far more legible fashion, Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) celebrates its modern antiquity as it seamlessly merges past and present. Painted on a saturated, blank background the artist appropriated from modern advertising, his nude, an ancient Aphrodite type transfigured by Léger’s gleaming industrial aesthetic, is thrust into our space and compels us to see the beauty and also the modernity of classical form. For Léger, as for Picasso, de Chirico and many of their vanguard peers, “the art of antiquity had meaning only if,” as Mr. Green writes, “it spoke in the present tense.”

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.

U.S. Will Be Without Donovan Against Italy

The U.S. men’s soccer team plays Italy in a friendly Wednesday, but coach Jurgen Klinsmann (pictured) will be without Landon Donovan, who had to withdraw due to illness. Donovan has yet to pair with Clint Dempsey, one of the English Premier League’s top goal scorers this season, since Klinsmann took control of the squad last summer. Despite missing Donovan, the Americans will look to build on their three-game winning streak, although they have struggled playing in Europe. Prior to the team’s 3-2 win over Slovenia in November, the U.S. had lost seven straight games on the Continent since beating Poland in March 2008.

—Joe E. Melvin

Griffin Says He Ran Faster at NFL Combine

Robert Griffin III impressed scouts with his official time of 4.41 seconds in the 40-yard dash, best among quarterbacks at the NFL combine. But he may have run even faster. The Heisman Trophy winner said Monday he was told on the field that it was actually 4.35 seconds. Griffin didn’t throw in Indianapolis over the weekend, but will hold a pro day on Baylor’s campus in three weeks.

—Associated Press

Associated Press

Northwestern forward John Shurna

Northwestern Positions for Elusive NCAA Bid

Is this the year the cruelest curse in college basketball finally ends? Northwestern is the only team in the six major conferences that has never played in the NCAA tournament, but two weeks from Selection Sunday, the Wildcats have positioned themselves to snap the streak. As the No. 43 team in the RPI rankings, Northwestern is squarely on the bubble with a pair of regular-season games remaining before the Big Ten tournament next week. The Wildcats host No. 10 Ohio State Wednesday.

—Ben Cohen

Por MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

O esforço da chanceler Angela Merkel para ganhar o apoio da população alemã à sua estratégia de salvar a Grécia e o euro sofreu um revés durante o fim de semana, quando um membro de alto escalão do seu próprio governo disse que Atenas deve ser encorajada a deixar o bloco.

“As chances da Grécia de renovar-se e tornar-se mais competitiva com certeza são maiores fora da zona do euro do que dentro dela”, disse o ministro do Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, numa entrevista à revista alemã “Der Spiegel”. Friedrich, que pertence a um partido da Bavária afiliado ao Partido Democrata Cristão, de Merkel, acrescentou que a Grécia não deve ser forçada a sair, mas sim receber incentivos “que eles não possam recusar”.

O parlamento da Alemanha deve aprovar hoje, por esmagadora maioria, o mais recente pacote de resgate da Grécia, com o apoio dos maiores partidos da oposição. Mas, com a sólida maioria dos alemães opondo-se ao pacote e uma crescente oposição dentro da sua própria coalizão, Merkel pode ter dificuldades para conseguir apoio mais para frente, especialmente se Atenas não conseguir realizar os cortes de orçamento e medidas de austeridade que prometeu.

A oposição na Alemanha ao resgate da Grécia não tem nada de novo. Friedrich, porém, é o primeiro ministro a publicamente discordar da chanceler sobre o assunto, num reflexo do crescente conflito em torno dos riscos que Berlim está assumindo.

Ainda mais importante é que Friedrich acrescentou uma voz influente à ideia de que Atenas pode ser gentilmente empurrada para fora da zona do euro, sem que isso cause o colapso do bloco.

Até pouco tempo atrás, qualquer político alemão que defendesse a saída da Grécia da zona do euro arriscava-se a ser taxado de extremista. A resposta inicial da Alemanha à crise da Grécia baseou-se no temor de que negar ajuda precipitaria uma nova crise financeira mundial. Merkel várias vezes citou o defunto banco americano Lehman Brothers, quando lutava por mais ajuda.

Ainda assim, a calma relativa que baixou sobre os mercados financeiros nos últimos meses, mesmo com a crise na Grécia piorando, contribuiu para convencer um número cada vez maior de autoridades em Berlim de que o euro pode sobreviver sem a Grécia. O argumento é que os bancos e outros investidores na dívida da Grécia já tiveram tempo de dar baixa nas suas posições, eliminando o perigo de um choque repentino.

Mas Merkel e os líderes do Banco Central Europeu não compartilham essa opinião. Eles temem que deixar a Grécia sair criaria um perigoso precedente. Outros membros vulneráveis da zona do euro — como Portugal, Irlanda e Espanha — poderiam ser vítimas de uma corrida aos bancos que provocaria um pânico generalizado, interrompendo o comércio entre fronteiras e destruindo o euro.

Merkel vem lutando desde que a crise começou para convencer os alemães de que a Grécia, que não conseguiu cumprir as exigências do seu resgate original, de 110 bilhões de euros (US$ 147,9 bilhões), deve receber mais ajuda. Sendo a Alemanha a maior economia da Europa, sua parcela nos resgates da Grécia e outros países é maior que a dos demais membros da zona do euro.

Mais de 60% dos alemães opuseram-se a esse último resgate e acreditam que a Grécia não tem como ser salva da moratória, de acordo com uma pesquisa da firma alemã Emnid, divulgada ontem.

Numa carta enviada aos legisladores na sexta-feira, pedindo o apoio deles ao novo resgate, o ministro da Fazenda da Alemanha, Wolfang Schäuble, escreveu que “esta pode não ser a última vez” que eles serão solicitados a salvar financeiramente a Grécia.

Mas alguns experientes legisladores assinalaram que a Grécia pode voltar pedindo mais.

“Chega um ponto em que você atinge o fim da linha porque mais liquidez não está resolvendo os problemas”, disse Rainer Brüderle, chefe parlamentar dos Democratas Livres, um novo membro da coalizão do governo, numa entrevista ao The Wall Street Journal.

(Contribuíram Beate Preuschoff e Christopher Lawton.)

By PETER PLAGENS

‘Don’t be modest,” says a character in Mark Lee Luther’s 1924 novel, “The Boosters.” “It doesn’t pay. We’re all boosters in Los Angeles.” Alas, the city’s history of one booster campaign after another, from railroads, citrus growers and land salesmen, has left Los Angeles—for all the semitropical metropolis’s futurist gazing into the Pacific sun—with an inferiority complex. Through World War II, Angelenos directed their grousing at that small, snootty, ballet-and-opera city up the coast, San Francisco. More recently, the foil has been New York, and the resentment of Gotham is particularly sharp where modern and contemporary art are concerned. So when the lights were doused Oct. 2 on the gala-opening reception for the huge multi-institutional group of exhibitions that make up “Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980″ and a son et lumière spectacular commenced on every marbled wall of the Getty Center, it wasn’t long before a stentorian voiceover pronounced, “In contrast to New York Expressionism, artists in Southern California . . .”

Indeed, Andrew Perchuk of the Getty Research Institute has said, “For a long time it was thought that if you didn’t have a significant group of Abstract Expressionist paintings like New York or San Francisco, you couldn’t be a major art center.” The result, according to a Getty press release, is that “Southern California gave birth to many of today’s artistic trends—and yet the immensely rich story of how this came about . . . remains largely unknown.” The hoped-for corrective is “Pacific Standard Time,” a Getty-encouraged, Getty-subsidized (nearly $10 million in grants) collaboration among 60 Southern California institutions resulting in a smorgasbord of everything from handcrafted furniture to hard-edge painting, from guerrilla street performances to sculpture in aerospace materials—all made in California over the past 70 years or so—in shows rolling out over the next six months. With a little rental car and a pent-up urge to drive (I’m an Angeleno transplanted to New York a quarter-century ago), I took a look at about a dozen of the first PST shows, dispersed from Pasadena to San Diego.

PST boasts three centerpiece exhibitions—one at the Getty Museum itself, one at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s two locations, and one at MoCA in downtown Los Angeles. “Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-70″ (through Feb. 5) at the Getty is an elegant Cliffs Notes introduction. The show includes the sharply poetic, hard-edge abstract paintings (by Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg and others) that got the Los Angeles scene rolling in the 1950s; a choice selection of spooky assemblages by George Herms, the underknown black artist Ed Bereal (and, as always implicit throughout this account, “and others”); a roomful of big, airy abstract paintings by the not underknown Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis, and an assortment of what, back in the day, was called “fantastic object” sculpture in plastic and cast resin by Craig Kauffman and DeWaine Valentine. And what authoritative Los Angeles show could be without an Ed Ruscha “Standard Station” Pop painting? Certainly not the Getty’s table-setter.

“Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface” (through Jan. 22), at both MCASD’s downtown branch and its original La Jolla location, is the most visually satisfying meal on the PST menu. That’s partly because of the nature of the art—lovingly austere and mystically colorful abstract sculpture and atmospheric environments—and partly because the artists (Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, et al.) were so talented. And boy, were they young! Ms. Corse was only 20 when she ventured into lyrically all-white minimalist paintings (later to be deliciously complicated by the inclusion of highway-sign reflectivity) that make Robert Ryman seem like a Victorian schoolmaster by comparison. Kauffman, with his techno-lush plastic reliefs, emerges as the premiere object-maker of 1960s cutting-edge Los Angeles art. And the best works I encountered in my 500-mile pilgrimage were Mr. Turrell’s “Stuck Red” and “Stuck Blue” (both 1970), two brilliant vertical rectangles of light on separated walls. At first you think they’re merely projections, but then . . . sorry, you really have to see them for yourself. Messrs. Irwin, Turrell and Wheeler, in particular, manipulated light and space to create experiences, instead of objects, as works of art. Their pieces were, in my opinion, Southern California’s greatest contributions to art before 1980.

At the other end of the utopia/dystopia spectrum from “Phenomenal” lies curator Paul Schimmel’s “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981″ (through Feb. 13) at MoCA. Mr. Schimmel is fond of dark, borrowed titles. In 1992 he appropriated “Helter Skelter” from author Vincent Bugliosi (who borrowed it from mass-murderer Charles Manson, who borrowed it from a Beatles song) for an earlier MoCA anthology show. It too, exuded nasty sex, nasty violence and a generally Punk take on life (and death) in the Golden State. The current show’s title is taken from a song by “X,” the 1970s Los Angeles Punk band. Some of the same artists are back—Richard Jackson with his antipainting pancake stacks of canvases, Paul McCarthy with residue from his scatologically slapstick performances, and Llyn Foulkes with weird Pop-surrealist paintings.

One trouble with the exhibition is that a good deal of it unironically consists of the same stuff—dry typewritten reports, deadpan photos, graphs and plans and maps, etc.—employed by the art’s targets: corporations, the military and bureaucrats. (A hilarious exception: Jeffrey Vallance’s funeral documents for a dead chicken, a.k.a. “Blinky, the Friendly Hen,” that he bought in a supermarket). Another drawback of “Under the Big Black Sun” is a feeling that the disaffection is forced. CalArts and UCLA (where many of the show’s artists were students or teachers) aren’t the South Bronx. While dress-up abjectness on the part of artists is OK, the art should look genuine. The show seems like “Helter Skelter Lite,” perhaps because it is part of an otherwise upbeat civic initiative on behalf of Los Angeles art. Still, Mr. Schimmel gets credit for pretty much putting the lie to a New York critic’s estimate of the ’70s Los Angeles art scene as solely “hip young dropout types in Venice, Calif., making baubles for the rich.”

Posturing isn’t a problem with what I’d call the “learning shows” that try to correct the shunting aside of women, African-American and Latino artists during PST’s time period. They make fine use of the Getty largesse: bringing in outside scholars to help with the research, publishing fat, informative catalogs, searching out works crucial to the shows’ theses, and—best of all for a viewer—creating first-class installations. “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” (through Jan. 28) at the Otis College of Art and Design, for instance, would probably be an amen-corner jumble were it not for the time, womanpower and scrutiny the gallery was able to give to wall upon wall, and vitrine upon vitrine, of primary source material from the mid-’70s salad days of the women’s movement in the Los Angeles art world.

Just as female artists had more than qualms about proceeding with business as usual in a male-dominated art world (one straw weighing on the camel’s back was the publication of a 1969 calendar with 12 male artists in their cool cars), black artists in Los Angeles found it difficult to fiddle around with perceptual niceties after Watts burned in 1965. David Hammons, an eventual MacArthur fellow who would decamp for New York in 1974, said “I wish I could make art like [James Turrell's], but we’re too oppressed for me to be dabbling out there.” Nevertheless, enough solid, beautifully aggressive African-American art was made during a 20-year period in Los Angeles for the Hammer Museum to mount “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980″ (through Jan. 8), the most arresting show outside the centerpiece triumvirate. It contains several rediscoveries, among them assemblagist Noah Purifoy, whose works are certainly ripe for a retrospective. For my money, the small steel “Lynch Fragments” sculptures of the hardly unknown Melvin Edwards (a Guggenheim Fellow and professor emeritus at Rutgers) are the standout works of this exhibition. They’re compactly aggressive welded-steel amalgams of chains, tools and abstract forms whose crisply channeled anger makes “Now Dig This!” one of PST’s best early-round exhibitions.

“MEX/LA: ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985″ (through Feb. 5) at the capacious Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach adds to the learning curve. It offers not only requisite glimpses of Mexican-American art, but a prologue of Mexican muralists in California in the ’30s and subsequently influential Anglo artists (such as painter-architect Millard Sheets) who learned so much from them. The show doesn’t shy away from cringe-inducing material—such as clips from Warner Bros.’ “Speedy Gonzalez” cartoons from the ’50s—which makes it a risky, lively mix. “MEX/LA” makes “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972-1987″ (through Dec. 4) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art look awfully thin by comparison. To be fair, Asco—a Mexican-American artists’ collaborative including Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón and Patssi Valdez—performed such antics as taping Ms. Valdez to a wall as an “instant mural.” You probably had to be there; small photographic mementos of these thumbs in the eye of the art establishment are overwhelmed by the big Lacma galleries.

Your visit to Lacma will be salvaged by “Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969-1972, Revisited.” It’s the first time this hokey but mesmerizing life-size assemblage depicting a black man’s castration by five rednecks has been shown in the U.S.

Getty money and encouragement has made the installations of some midtier shows first-rate, among them the old costumes and vintage videos of “Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983″ (through Jan. 29) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a peaceful refuge on an otherwise semiseedy Hollywood Boulevard, and an exhibition, “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman
and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976″ (through Jan. 22) at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Berman was a great pioneer assemblagist who made mysterious cabinets with fragments of Hebrew letters and old photographs inside; Heinecken, a not-so-great photographer who turned soft-core porn into montages.

Finally, a mention of “California Design, 1930-1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way,’” at Lacma through March 25. An argument could be made that Southern California’s most significant contribution to modernism besides “Light and Space” art is its own style of industrial design. Bauhaus + beach: Low-lying hi-fi consoles, swoopy chairs, dude-ranch dresses, and those wonderful transparent “Case Study” houses up in the hills.

During my sampling of “Pacific Standard Time,” I saw more than the shows outlined above, but I also missed a few—and obviously I couldn’t check out PST exhibitions not yet open. Nevertheless, my eyes roamed over enough art and plowed through enough catalogs that I can ask a few nettlesome questions about the project. First, how is this vast undertaking supposed to be consumed? The venue of the northernmost PST exhibition, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is more than 200 miles from MoCA San Diego. Southern California suffers a paucity of public transportation, and the roads are always crammed with cars. A Los Angeles artist remarked to me, “Whenever you get someplace on time on the freeway, you feel like you’ve put something over on somebody.” Only a few dedicated art professionals and academics will manage to see all 70 or so PST exhibitions, and most people only a few.

Second, isn’t PST preaching to the choir? If the Getty and participating institutions want to make the case that modern art in Southern California is right up there with New York’s or anybody else’s, shouldn’t at least the three centerpiece shows be on view at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston?

Third, is not PST’s very existence a tacit admission of minor-leagueness? (I spent my childhood in a Los Angeles without major-league baseball and can still remember how having to make do with the old Pacific Coast League rankled the adults.) It’s hard to imagine Chicago, whose postwar art also got short shrift in New-York-centric histories of modern art, mounting a “Central Standard Time” campaign.

Finally, it’s been said that generals always fight the previous war. Command Central at the Getty may not have noticed, but the art world has gone global: There are biennials in Korea and Turkey, a huge production and consumption machine in China, and multizillion-dollar museums rising in the Middle East. Contemporary art from India is the current hot item, and South America is champing at the bit.

Of course, these considerations should be more PST’s than mine. I care about seeing good art—no matter how many Hummers in the left lane slow my pursuit of it—and not so much about grand cultural strategies thought up by grand museums. Being able to gaze upon the most gorgeous object that Judy Chicago, one of the founders of the Women’s Building, ever produced—a painted Corvair car hood at the Getty show—and to look at one of Senga Nengudi’s lovely and prescient stretched-nylon sculptures at the Hammer Museum—these are the kinds of experiences that made my sojourn rewarding. A little boosterism is fine, but in the end, who cares which coast has the art-historical upper hand? It’s the art that counts.

Mr. Plagens, a writer and a painter, is at work on a book about the artist Bruce Nauman, to be published by Phaidon.