The well-run 1984 Olympics transformed Los Angeles. Not through the Games, which thrillingly came and went, but through the Olympic Arts Festival, which taught us to dream and inspired us to do. Forty year later, we have added Walt Disney Concert Hall , Los Angeles Opera , the Getty Center , the Soraya , the Geffen Playhouse , the Hammer Museum , the Wallis , the Nimoy , the Industry , L.
A. Dance Project , Wild Up , the Broad museum and the Broad Stage . The Olympic Arts Festival turned us into an arts capital in a remarkably short period of time.
Now that Paris has symbolically handed the Olympic torch back to us, our Games in 2028 no longer seem so far away. By then, we will have added Frank Gehry’s new Colburn Center , a 1,000-seat concert hall with the potential of turning Grand Avenue into an avenue of the arts unlike any in the world. A short Metro ride away will be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries .
This leaves the arts community excited and galvanized but also alarmed after Casey Wasserman , chairman of LA28, the private group putting on the L.A. Games, said following the closing ceremony in Paris: “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower.
We do have a Hollywood sign.” Tom Cruise’s motorcycle tour from the boulevards of Paris to the Hollywood Hills in the ceremony’s tacky finale only increased concern. Meanwhile, the death on Sept.
30 of Robert Fitzpatrick , the force of nature behind the 1984 Olympic Arts Fe.
