Artists are answering a calling

Picture this: an art exhibition devoted to “cellphone media” -- that is, works of art that can be created using a cellphone, including phones equipped with built-in “phonecams” to shoot pictures of your immediate environment and transmit them to those needing to know ASAP the exact contents of the grocery cart behind you at Ralphs.

Actually, at least three such exhibitions have opened in Los Angeles this year. But according to Laura Merian , curator of “Cell-outs and Phonies,” now at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art on Melrose, this latest exhibition differs from two previous cellular efforts -- “Sent: America’s First Phonecam Art Show” at downtown’s Standard hotel and “Show&Tel;: Art of Connection” at Zimmer Children’s Museum -- because it explores the full artistic range of the cellular phone, not just the phonecam.

In the new show, short films are being displayed on monitors or projected.

Other images are printed, and one artist has sent an actual phone containing photos for viewers to scroll through. The opening reception featured “music assembled entirely with ring tones by the German experimental group Super Smart.”

The participating artists include David Zulaica, Krista Connerly, Gina Clyne and singer-songwriter Al B. Sure, who Merian says has used his phonecam to create “beautiful landscapes in New York.”

Merian acknowledges that “Cell-outs and Phonies,” which mixes established artists with amateurs, is as much high-concept as high art -- but she adds that the exhibition is “actually aesthetically not a curatorial disaster. The concept is there, of course, but it can also be used as a valid medium.”