'Land art' makes California a selfie center

LOS ANGELES - A house clad in mirrors pops out of the California desert. It blends into the landscape, reflecting a kaleidoscope of the urban grid and arid valley of Palm Springs to the delight of photographers and selfie-seekers.

This is Doug Aitken's Mirage, one of the showstoppers of Desert X, an exhibition of 16 site-specific monumental works by international artists that spans southern California's Coachella Valley.

The works are mostly "land art", massive installations in nature. The exhibition includes a replica of assassinated president John F. Kennedy's nuclear shelter, a mirrored fence, a wall of optical effects, a traditional earthen shelter and an anti-social robot.

Desert X runs through April - with Mirage set to remain in place for six months. The show has attracted tens of thousands of people since its opening four weeks ago, including hipsters, art lovers and residents of the region not normally attracted to museums.

"We had 5,000 people per weekend," close to twice the number expected, says Desert X artistic director Neville Wakefield.

The success of the exhibition highlights the growing creative clout of Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where new galleries and museums, prestigious fashion shows and trendy tourism destinations offer a counterweight to New York on the other side of the country.

Economic factors are driving the shift, with many artists fleeing the exorbitant rents of New York. But the trend also has philosophical underpinnings in the historic campaign to settle the West.

Mirage, which is shaped like an ordinary ranch-style suburban house, symbolizes the cult of real estate, a central tenet of the American Dream. It is also a nod to the "mid-century modern" architectural masterpieces of Palm Springs.

"I'm interested in seeing artwork as something that can be alive on its own and continuously in flux," says Aitken, a top contemporary American artist.

The location of Mirage, which reflects the surrounding sky and landscape, was "very important".

"I wanted to have a perspective as looking from a desert hillside toward the suburbs and that vista extending past the suburbs and reclaimed by the raw desert continuing on undeveloped into the horizon," he says.

The organizers of Desert X give only the latitude and longitude coordinates of the works and not their addresses, forcing visitors to search for them and discover little-known places along the way, like the Whitewater Preserve where art-seekers can find "One I Call."

Agence France-Presse