Beautiful, Yes, But These Ain't No Losers

We’ll never forget how cool we felt telling someone who lived in St. Louis about the “Beautiful Losers” exhibition when it started its global ramble a few years ago. For someone new to LA, this roster of artists was the ultimate measure of how much a place like California ruled. “Oh yeah, it’s like graffiti, and skateboarding, and, you know, surfing…” Popular culture has since been irrevocably altered by that unofficial collective of artists, and today, if we were to tell that same person about the show, we could even call a few of the artists by name–“Geoff McFetridge, Shepard Fairey, Mike Mills…”–and that person would probably get it.