Dada for The Valley Girl

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SHOW: HELTER SKELTER: L.A. ART IN THE 1990S

WHERE: MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES

WHAT: PAINTING AND SCULPTURE BY 16 ARTISTS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Helter Skelter? The title says it all. You thought the art of the 1980s was bad? This is worse.

"THE RISKS OF SUCH A TITLE are apparent," the catalog of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art prissily begins, " -- that the grisly and gruesome Charles Manson murders would be glorified, that the show would seem to be about the sixties . . ." Aw, c'mon, just because we call an exhibition "Helter Skelter," you wouldn't necessarily think better of Charlie aging away there in maximum security, would you? A pity the curator in question, Paul Schimmel, won't come out with it: We want a lurid title but, hey, we're a museum. Maybe we need a bit of sensationalism to, as they say, "reach out" and "address the concerns of" the Los Angeles trendy art crowd, a fairly debased rabble, we feel, and with shorter memories than mice.

Anyhow, though the level of originality in the American art world is bottoming out -- a fact abundantly confirmed by this show -- the risk of actual copycat crime is low. The critic, on seeing this heavily promoted exhibition, might be tempted to practice a few arabesques on its thick skin with the carving knife, but the sheer dumbness of the art itself is a kind of body armor. Really bad art is probably invulnerable to criticism, and so it is with this slumgullion. If you thought new American art couldn't get much worse than it was by the end of the 1980s, visit MOCA and learn. It isn't Charles Manson you think of in "Helter Skelter" but John Milton on the topography of the netherworld: "And in the lowest depths, a lower depth." The thesis of the show is that just below the sunny promotional surface of Los Angeles there is a stratum of alienation, murder, bad dreams and apocalyptic fantasies that reflect themselves inexorably in art.

This, to put it mildly, is not an unfamiliar trope. It is almost as old as Los Angeles itself -- the other side of its perennial cultural struggle between civic boosterism and social derangement. It has been implanted in the city's self-image for at least 60 years, reflected in innumerable films, novels, detective stories, photography. It begins long before Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city -- a vision that would be made real by the 1965 Watts riots. It continues long after the movie Blade Runner, 1982. It is not news; but to qualify as news (at least in a museum), this imagery would need to be embodied in some fairly convincing new works of art.

Not this time. Installed in the vast, operatic spaces of MOCA'S industrial annex, the Temporary Contemporary -- once a police-car garage -- the show looks like the Gotterdammerung of academic Postmodernism: inflated, whining, self-indulgent and occasionally clever-clever. Given thousands and thousands of square feet in which to diffuse itself, the intellectual vacuity of the artists is such that their molecules of thought hardly even bump together.