The Scariest Place in LA Right Now Isn't a Haunted House - It's a Free Art Show
Installation view of ‘What a Wonderful World An Audiovisual Poem at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White..jpg
This post was originally published on Forbes.com.
Assassination, Columbine, 9/11.
What a wonderful world.
Blackface, self-mutilation, cult leaders.
What a wonderful world.
Kids in Klan costumes, binge drinking, Nazi monkeys.
What a wonderful world.
Free popcorn.
“What a Wonderful World.”
Part haunted house, part film festival, part grindhouse, part art exhibition, “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” takes over the wonderfully creepy Venetian-inspired Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles through March 20, 2026. Open to the public free of charge (register) Wednesdays through Sundays from 5:00 PM until midnight, 45 time-based artworks from silent movies and early film classics to the present day take visitors on a 100-plus year journey of visual storytelling.
Walt Disney and Felix the Cat to Marina Abramović and an anonymous YouTube creator who’s montage to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” (1965) stands as squarely in its power as anything else on view.
What visitors see blows past unsettling, leaving disturbing in the dust, and approaches nauseating at times. Viewer discretion advised. Attendees will either be fleeing for the exits in under 10 minutes or find it one of the most affecting art experiences in memory. Both reactions are valid.
Consider it a happening.
Take that L.A.–think you’ve seen everything.
People will talk. Talk trash and heap praise. Is this buzzy?
There are no instructions for traversing the building, no formula, no right or wrong way to regard the artworks.
“Embrace the disorientation,” curator/editor Udo Kittelmann said at a press preview for “What a Wonderful World” on its February 6 opening night.
The building and material are dark. Literally and figuratively. A cacophony of overlapping and disquieting noises rattles throughout the circa 1924 venue. A venue whose scars and rough edges become part of the brilliant installation. Its exposed walls and ceilings and wires. The musty smell. The basement’s earthen floor. Feel the grit through the bottom of your shoes walking over it.
Awkward rooms and corners and narrow, darkened hallways.
Don’t let any of that dissuade you from attending, quite the opposite, lean into it. Go to experience the theater alone.
Hell, it’s free and open late.
An extraordinary building perfectly suited for the nightmares on view inside. This artwork doesn’t belong in a nicer place, a fancier place, in Beverly Hills or Malibu.
The concept feels like the premise to a horror movie attendees unwittingly find themselves participants in. If at some point when exploring the theater your self-preservation instinct kicks in and you find yourself thinking, “is this a good idea,” that’s healthy.
It’s easy imaging watchers watching the fancy, LA, art world types moving through the theater talking at their screens saying, “You went to an abandoned theater in downtown LA with dozens of secluded rooms and darkened corridors and sound loud enough to drown out your screams to watch the most horrifying scenes ever captured on film and that felt ok to you! That didn’t feel like a trap? And it was free? In LA? That didn’t raise any red flags?”
All yours Hollywood.
Adding to the cinema, to the genius of the location, underscoring the rot and violence of humanity playing inside, outside, perfectly visible from the theater, hangs a 10-story advertisement for the “Call of Duty Black Ops” video game on the Hotel Figueroa across the street. It’s pool is coffin shaped. Two blocks down the street crowds gather at financial scam arena across from a graffiti takeover of a 50-story monument to late-stage capitalism.
What a wonderful world.
A-plus for the location scout.
“What a Wonderful World” is scarier than any haunted house or horror movie or video game, however, because the ghouls and demons shown here are real. The monsters of humanity.
They appear in Arthur Jafa’s rapid-fire Apex (2013), a sensory busting video summarizing African American culture playing on rotation in the main theater. It makes as good a place start as any when visiting.
Finish in the subterranean basement, a dungeon-like space almost too on the nose for the horror comparisons. Around a corner and down a hallway find Robert Boyd’s Xanadu (2006), “an archive of catastrophe edited to euphoric dance remixes of pop anthems,” as adroitly detailed in “What a Wonderful World’s” clever catalogue bound and written to mimic a screenplay. Planes smashing into buildings, military parades, cult leaders, religious zealots, and politicians eager to capitalize on tragedy confront viewers while joyful jams from Brittany Spears, Donna Summer, Madonna, and Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” play at a pounding pitch. A disco ball whirls overhead.
Again, from the catalogue, “In Boyd’s hands, the luminous promise of Newton-John’s disco hit becomes a cruel counterpoint to the images it accompanies, a hallucinatory inversion of paradise, where the ‘pleasure-dome’ is erected on the ruins of grief.”
“What a Wonderful World.”
A city bus drives past the Variety Arts Theatre emblazoned with an advertisement for the latest installment of the “Scream” horror movie franchise: “Scream 7: Burn it all down.”
Yes.
What a wonderful world.
Julia Stoschek Foundation
Installation view of ‘What a Wonderful World An Audiovisual Poem at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White.
Artworks on view in “What a Wonderful World” come from German collector Julia Stoschek who, since 2002, has established one of the world’s most comprehensive private collections of time-based media art: moving image, video, film, performance, and virtual reality. The middle-aged daughter of an auto parts billionaire, Stoschek’s stylish, queen bee energy gives no outward indication that the depths of human depravity would be the kind of artwork she’d find attractive.
Her foundation manages the collection; this is its first presentation in the U.S.
“It’s really a dream come true,” Stoschek said at “What a Wonderful World’s” press preview. “Los Angeles is the city of the moving image. No other city has shaped the global language of cinema like Los Angeles.”
Stoschek served on the board of trustees at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 2018 through 2022.
“The technical language (of time-based art) has changed radically, but the core concept has stayed the same,” she continued. “The fundamental questions of humanity didn’t change at all: fear, desire, violence, power, identity, intimacy, and, of course, love.”
True enough.
2026, 1926, 1826, the world has always been a horror show. Violence, corruption, abuse, inequality, power. Against all odds, to counter every King Leopold II and Stephen Miller, there’s been just enough joy and love and compassion to sustain humanity.
John Rafman’s Oh, the humanity! (2015) grounds the presentation’s soul according to Kittelmann, and life’s, “combination between magic and tragic and drama.”
“A sweeping odyssey into the depth of human experiences while holding up a mirror to the state of the world today,” in Stoshek’s words.
Hopefully the mirror doesn’t break.
‘End of the World’
Marina Abramović, still image from 'The Hero,' 2001, video, 14′21′′, bw, sound. Courtesy Stoschek Foundation.
“What a Wonderful World” will be accompanied by a series of events held every Sunday from live performances and readings to screenings and discussions.
What visitors experience will linger, long after you wish it would leave in many cases. Marina Abramović’s stoic, mournful, black-and-white The Hero (2001) may wreck you. The artist sits in profile on a white horse in an empty field holding a white flag that flaps in the wind. She sings a pan-Slavic hymn of resistance. She sings for her father, a Yugoslavian who fought the fascists in World War II. She sings for new heroes, heroes outside of the historic hero archetypes of war and nationalism and monuments to men on horses.
“Abramović’s hero is not the militant patriot of old, but an enlightened figure stripped of ego, ideology, and the illusion of victory,” the catalogue explains.
Excruciating. Simple. Profound.
You try looking away, but can’t.
From a performance artist who sings, to a singer who’s also a performance artist.
Guests who stay until closing time each night are treated to Miley Cyrus’s End of the World (Live from Chateau Marmont) (2024) at 11:45 in the main theater.
“What a wonderful world.”
About Chadd Scott
A midlife career crisis at 40 led Chadd Scott to begin writing about art with no background in it following a 20 year career in the sports media. Learning "Art History 101" from YouTube videos, used books, and podcasts, Scott found the more he looked, the more he liked. He now freelances for Forbes.com, Western Art Collector magazine, Native American Art magazine, and Fodors.com among other publications while operating his own website, www.seegreatart.art, a daily look at art exhibitions and events across the United States. Scott's particular interests in the art world are Native American, African American, and female artists and how art intersects with social justice. As he likes to say, "a people's history is best learned through their artwork." Scott especially enjoys traveling to off-the-beaten-path arts destinations across America. His favorite artist is Earl Biss. His favorite arts destination is Santa Fe, NM. Scott lives in Fernandina Beach, FL.