SU N SH IN E

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NOIR?

migration are predictably diverse: ranging from the impact of Thatcherite cuts upon the British university system to the relative decline of architec tural commissions in the rest of the Sunbelt. More important, however, is the major pull factor: a boom in cultural investment at the level of the design professions, fine arts institutions, and elite university departments as well as a new siren song from the studios. The broad trend of this immigration, moreover, is thoroughly mercenary, as the new wave of designers, artists and professors have come to praise Caesar - in this case, international real-estate capital. The large-scale developers and their financial allies, together with a few oil magnates and entertainment moguls, have been the driving force behind the public-private coalition to build a cultural superstructure for Los Angeless emergence as a world city. They patronize the art market, endow the museums, subsidize the regional institutes and planning schools, award the architectural competitions, dominate the arts and urban design taskforces, and influence the flow of public arts monies. They have become so integrally involved in the organization of high culture, not because of oldfashioned philanthropy, but because culture has become an important component of the land development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between different elites and regional centers. Oldfashioned material interest, in other words, drives the mega-developers to support the general cultural revalorization of Los Angeles, and, more speci fically, to endorse the concentration of cultural assets in nodes of maximum development. This culture strategy has a long history behind it. Since the 1920s, the Downtown elite (composed of old guard families, led by the Chandler dynasty of the Times, who had sunk their patrimonies in Downtown real estate), faced with the centrifugal movement of investment westward along Wilshire Boulevard, have struggled to recenter the region around a revitalized central business district. At various times, they have tried to repell, or assimilate, the autonomous Westside power structure that arose out of Jewish interests in the entertainment, savings-and-loan, and suburban real-estate sectors. Contrastingly, the Jewish elites have pursued their own spatial strategy of centering academic and cultural institution-building on the Westside. More recently, as offshore capital has partially supplanted this old ruling-class antinomy, central-place rivalries have been subsumed into

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