JANUARY in Los Angeles brought torrential rain, and three art fairs which livened up the gray city.

First up on the calendar was photo LA (January 14–17) at the Santa Monica Civic Center. With the economy the way it is (dismal, like the weather) there was some anxiety that no one would show up — but they did on opening night, and in droves. It would be hard to say whether this was due to interest in photography or in partying, but certainly there was plenty of both. The number of exhibitors was cut back from last year, down to 40 from 65, but that's been true all over the world, including at Art Basel Miami.

Fair founder and dealer Stephen Cohen reminds us that photo LA is the oldest ongoing art fair in Los Angeles, this being its 19th year, which is noteworthy in a city fickle with art fairs. (The FADA art fairs — now the FADA Los Angeles Art Show — have had a broken history, and Cohen's other fair, artLA, fizzled this year while Art Los Angeles Contemporary took its place, though more on that later.)

Was photo LA a success or not? Sales were made, but just how many and whether it was enough remains to be seen; will enough dealers come back for the next edition? As always, there were some lovely vintage prints: the works from the Czech Center of Photography and Stephen White Associates, for example. There were also lots of giant-sized, computer-altered prints. What used to be novelty is now standard, and it does erode our confidence in photography in general — so much that we tend to, for example, question every contemporary landscape: Did they add this unusual color to the sky? Did they add these trees? These birds?

The second LA art fair, the Los Angeles Art Show (FADA) returned to the Convention Center, also with a reduced roster, although the organizers managed to fill the voluminous hall with special exhibitions. It's a great space for exhibitions and, as always, FADA presented a panoply of delights — something for serious veteran collectors, something for the younger set wanting to see more off-the-grid work.

For the veteran collectors, for example, there were LA's veteran dealers Louis Stern and Jack Rutberg right at the entrance — Stern focusing on his hard-edged painters Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin; Rutberg with a sampling of the various artists he represents: Hans Burkhardt, Patrick Graham, Francisco Zuniga and Ruth Weisberg. Sculpturesite from San Francisco installed a Jeffery Laudenslager stainless steel and titanium sculpture in the café area: a series of sweeps of metal, lightly stacked atop one another. In their gallery space were a couple works by Mary Shaffer, including a translucent blue glass piece, upright like a shower curtain, called Deep Blue Rain-Curtain.

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