UNTITLED

No one ever said it’s easy being an artist. For every Ed Ruscha, there are thousands of talented, dedicated artists who rarely, if ever, see the light of a gallery.

This month, Pharmaka in L.A. had Ruscha’s younger sibling, Paul Ruscha, curate a show of his favorite lesser-knowns. The result is “Tres Desperados,” abstract works by Shane Guffogg, Ernesto Sanchez and Dan Lutzick. “The title is in fun,” Ruscha says. “But there is a little desperation when you’re over 30 and not showing at Gagosian.”

Hope and desperation are also at the heart of Morgan Neville’s documentary “Cool School,” at LACMA next Thursday. The film focuses on the early days of the Ferus Gallery in the 1950s, when guys such as Ed Kienholz, Wally Berman and Robert Irwin made their mark. Most of the interviewees remember the Ferus boys as fun-loving guys with little money and even fewer prospects, yet they caroused, brawled and womanized with the best of them. As Neville says, the Ferus clan “found a sense of purpose through their relationship to the gallery, and that purpose ultimately changed the face of L.A.’s cultural elite.”

The film also shows the ‘50s and early ‘60s to be anything but rosy. As Neville says, artists in L.A. were routinely condemned as communists, mocked in public and arrested for obscenity. But Paul Ruscha remembers the time slightly differently: “I don’t think the party stopped, at least for me, until 1978 or ’79.”

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