7 Shows That Make This Art Festival Worth the Trip to California

The sprawling PST festival of more than 70 exhibitions doesn’t quite live up to its theme of art and science colliding. But there is a handful of impressive entries.

Bigger and bulkier than ever, the art omnibus formerly called “Pacific Standard Time,” now known by the snappier “PST,” is making its once-every-several-years appearance across Southern California this fall. Bankrolled by the Getty Foundation and centered in Los Angeles, the $20.4 million initiative is made up of more than 70 exhibitions, organized by museums and nonprofit spaces large and small, and gathered, with varying degrees of cogency, under a single thematic banner: “PST ART: Art & Science Collide.”

The event’s two former editions were very much about place. The first, in 2011, revisited art made in and around Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980; the second, in 2017, surveyed Latino and Latin American art and culture from the region. The current version, which runs through Feb. 16, 2025, departs from this geographically grounded model, at a cost. Aside from nods toward Southern California’s history as a hub of the film and aerospace industries, much of the new PST lineup features generalist global themes — the environment, A.I., the Future — and as a result the event, as whole, feels shapeless and adrift.

The attempt to infuse a sense of coherence by injecting some drama into its title is no help. In most of the individual offerings we find art and science meshing, not clashing. But meshing can generate its own drama. And even if the cumulative effect of PST 2024 is sketchy, of the more than two dozen offerings I sampled a strong handful make the trip worthwhile.

Art, Science and Light

Unsurprisingly, given the deep financial and scholarly resources supporting PST, one of its most impressive entries is a jewel-box historical show organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and magisterially installed in its Brentwood citadel. Titled “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” it spans Western Europe’s so-called Long Middle Ages (roughly 800-1600 A.D.), when three sharp-elbowed religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — briefly and uneasily coexisted, and boundaries between science and religion, the material and the spiritual, were fluid.

Light, as presented here, was both a mysterious material phenomenon and an existentially loaded metaphor. Physically, optically, it let us measure time and distance, and see in the dark. Symbolically, it directed attention to the ineffable, made it imaginable.