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Dustin Hoffman and Lauren Hutton walked the red carpet. TomKat posed for pictures. From the open-air escalator there was a clear view of the iconic Hollywood sign.

But last Saturday's gala was no pre-Oscar party. In fact, the real star power came by way of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha. This was a premiere devoted to the city's other image makers – the opening of a $56-million addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

At 58,000 square feet, the space is twice the size of the Whitney. It was designed by Renzo Piano, the architect behind the Pompidou in Paris. And when the museum's new gallery opens today, visitors will enter through an installation of more than 200 vintage streetlamps titled Urban Light.

All a fitting coming out, really, for America's other art capital. According to a census analysis by University of Minnesota professor Ann Markusen, the cultural community in L.A. is growing faster than that of any other metropolitan area in the country.

And more artists means more art: There are an estimated 400 independent galleries within the city limits and major museums such as the J. Paul Getty and the Armand Hammer have been luring hot new curators on board to help promote contemporary work.

This month, even billboards on the Sunset Strip have been overtaken by a new art show. Called Women in the City, it includes pieces by artists such as Cindy Sherman, who borrow images from the movies that have long defined Los Angeles.

Now if only tourists would look up.

While Paris, New York and London attract millions of cultural tourists each year, L.A. is better known for Malibu beaches and the Paramount lot. Both mainstream museums and the city's bohemian pockets remain relatively undiscovered by outsiders.

Part of the problem, of course, is accessibility. Gallery districts are sprinkled amid the city's unwieldy sprawl, which baffles and frustrates even long-time residents.

“The scene here is fresh, but also extremely spread out,” figurative painter Kim Dane says. “There are a number of different art communities and fewer chances for random encounters.”

But creative delights can be found in this meandering monolith – if you know the right places to go. Just be sure to rent a car before you set out for sun-baked inspiration.

Burt Green Fine Art is exactly the sort of place the average tourist would avoid on a trip to Los Angeles.

A large, airy space in a former warehouse, it sits on the main floor of a half-abandoned industrial building in the city's burnt-out-but-slowly-rebounding downtown core. Outside, homeless addicts wander the streets pushing shopping carts.

Inside, though, visitors can see art like Yun Bai's Elegant, Nasty New Porn Flowers – a series of decorative Asian-inspired floral collages on cheerful lacquer backgrounds, which, on closer inspection, are made up of photographs of orgies. Just the sort of edgy work, in other words, that culture vultures seek out in Chelsea or SoHo.

Such experimental exhibits are partly supported by downtown real estate prices. Like Dane, who abandoned her SoHo loft for an Echo Park Victorian several years ago, Burt Green relocated to the West Coast for cheap rent. He pays just $1,200 for 3,600 square feet.

“Five years ago when I moved in, this place was a heroin hellhole,” the tidy, affable gallery owner says. “It was just like SoHo in 1969. And just like those galleries, we'll get kicked out of here eventually. In the meantime, it means I can exhibit people who don't sell a damn thing and keep my doors open. You can't do that in New York any more.”

Of course, that doesn't mean downtown art can't sell.

Take the work on display at La Luz de Jesus. Located in the back of a jam-packed novelty store called Wacko, on a baked-out strip of Sunset Boulevard, this 20-year-old art haven shares the sidewalk with barber shops offering $15 buzz cuts and tannorexic gay men cruising the strip in nothing but white short shorts and a fedora. (Okay one.) And that's all part of the charm for buyers. Miles Thompson's pieces, for example, were quickly snapped up at a recent show. And the street is part of the inspiration for artists and curators as well.

Billy Shire, a local art scene fixture who owns both La Luz and an eponymous space in Culver City, describes his galleries as his shrine to Southern California. The spirit of Los Angeles, he points out, has always been about lowbrow populism.

“This is the home of American pop culture,” he says. “It's where the Hells Angels, surfing, skateboarding, tattooing, Hollywood and animation all come together.”

A case in point: Shire's delightfully glib Culver City exhibition of art by Josh Agle, an L.A. illustrator who goes by the name Shag. Agle's retro cartoons reflect both Hollywood glamour and a commercial, cartoon style. His show last fall included vivid canvases with thin, two-dimensional figures frolicking on the beach and pieces like Welcome to Our Glorious Lifestyle, which shows sixties-style hipsters at a posh pool party.

“The L.A. scene has always been about people working in animation and tattoo … a lot of stuff that's fallen out of favour in the art world,” Shire says, “which these days is all about installations and having a degree from Yale.”

Then again, Los Angeles wouldn't be much of an art scene without battling schools of thought, would it?

At the same time Shire was showing off Shag, the Santa Monica Museum of Art across town hosted an installation by recent Yale grad Sharon Levy. It included life-sized cardboard cutouts in a sort of bayou setting. But the pieces had a cartoon feel, a pop sensibility that seemed to have more in common with Shire's lowbrow work than he might like to admit.

In the gallery's larger space, meanwhile, was an installation by U.S. iconoclast William Pope. An exploration of race, class, sex and death, it included whitewashed palm trees hanging lynched and bleeding from the ceiling.