I believe it was comedian Woody Allen who once quipped that the only cultural advantage that LA has over New York is that you can make a right hand turn on a red light. While that little joke is clever it is hardly accurate. Los Angeles has a large number of cultural outlets, many of them world renowned.

Los Angeles has no fewer than eleven opera companies, including the Long Beach Opera, the oldest opera company in Southern California. The Los Angeles Opera is known throughout the world and has attracted some of the greatest talent in the operatic world. The great Placido Domingo is the current Director of the LA Opera.

There are literally hundreds of theatres scatters around Los Angeles, including some of the most prestigious theatres in the country, the Dorothy Chandler Center and the Los Angles Performing Arts Center. These and other theatres produce both original productions, as well as, putting on some of the greatest plays the world has ever known.

And, as you would expect in the town where movies are made, Los Angeles has more than its share of huge movie palaces and gigantic multi-plex theatres, as well as, a ‘key’ roster of small “art houses.” No matter what your movie-going taste or budget, it is surely possible to find plenty of films to see throughout Los Angeles, many of which are exclusive premieres.

Los Angeles is also home to one of the largest concentrations of museums anywhere in the world. Probably the foremost museum in Los Angeles – and, indeed, one of the prestigious anywhere in the world – is the world-famous Getty Center Museum, which houses many of the world’s greatest masterpieces, not to mention world-class architecture. The museum cost more than one billion dollars to construct and was built complete from private funds donated by the Getty Oil Foundation

No less famous is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a collection of more than 150,000 pieces, the Natural History Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, with thousands of fossils of prehistoric animals that roamed Los Angles and an actual working excavation site that visitors can view.

The Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena is a true world-class museum, with one of the finest collections of 14th to 16th century paintings and statutes on exhibit anywhere in the world.

All told, Los Angeles has no fewer than 50 museums of note, everything from the aforementioned world class museums to those which are more grass-roots in nature, like the Craft and Folk Art Museum and independent galleries. Artistically put, no matter what your creative | visionary tastes may be, Los Angeles has the venue for you.