CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The last time I wrote about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I was musing over the fact that it had spent ten million dollars to move a piece of rock from a hillside to the back lot of the museum.
The museum's claim was that the rock was a piece of art and by seating it above an open-air tunnel, museum visitors would be thrilled.
At the time (2012) I found the expenditure to be kind of silly considering its lack of artistic or architectural worth. In fact, I invented a term for dramatic waste, which I called a rock, representing the ten-million-dollar cost of that project. At the time, the yearly salary for Lacma's director was around one deci-rock (it being close to a million dollars). I believe I suggested that LACMA could have preserved its wonderful film program for a few centi-rocks.
At the time, the installation of the rock sculpture represented an affectation and, to be blunt, an enormous waste of money, particularly when you considered the needs of other, truly important institutions such as the Long Beach Opera company. It also represented -- to put it simply -- just plain dullness of taste.
Well, we're in a new era where even expenditures of the rock variety don't raise a ripple. The topic which is making headlines is the proposal to spend two-thirds of a billion dollars to tear down the buildings that currently form the nucleus of the museum and replace them with something new.
But the director and publicity people at LACMA can't just say, "We need a new building because the structures we have right now are not the brash architectural statement that the director would like on his resume."
No. Here is how the LACMA website explains its proposal:
"More than a renovation: a completely new way to understand our relationship to the arts and culture of the past, the present, and the future.
Is this just the sort of blab that somebody put on a website, or does it represent some actual intent on the part of the management? In either case there is a problem. If it's just blab, then that is a signal that the management isn't really serious about explaining its project to the public. But if it's a serious statement, then what can it actually mean? At a minimum, the management and, by extension, county government are willing to spend $125 million of taxpayer dollars to (a) make a significantly negative impact on the ability of Wilshire Blvd to move traffic and (b) remove a collection of galleries that present the arts and culture of the past, the present, and the future rather than attempt to explain to the public some nonsensical notion about how they have to understand their own personal relationship to nineteenth century American painting. Or maybe that statement is supposed to mean something else entirely, like how our society as a whole understands its relationship . . .
But it gets worse:
"In Los Angeles we can be a laboratory for thinking about culture, and the framing device we call a museum."
Is this necessary? People travel to see the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus because they are beautiful and worth seeing. They are in museums because there is only one original of each one, and a museum is an institution that allows for public viewing. The museum serves to protect, preserve, repair, and present these works of art for public display. Perhaps there may be another dimension to the function of a museum, but do we really want to risk the aforesaid well established functions?
I suspect that the above quotes are really just blab and don't mean a lot in terms of intellectual depth. After all, we're still talking about a building that houses paintings. But if that is the case, what does it say about Lacma's attitude towards the public?
The proposed replacement structure is controversial to say the least. Take a look at this drawing. To me, it most closely resembles the elevated walkway that connects Terminal One at LAX to the parking garage.
The building is ugly.
Maybe that's too harsh a word. OK then-- it's plain. Drab. Uninspiring.
But take a closer look at the picture and ask yourself, "Could this be anything like reality, even after that $650 million gets spent?" Notice that this building is supposed to start on one side of Wilshire and cross above the street to the other side. Now look carefully at how the architects have presented Wilshire Blvd. It seems to be the ultimate version of what has been referred to as a road diet. The lanes seem to have been reduced in number and there are only a few cars. On the eastbound side (coming towards us in the picture) there are only two cars on the whole block.
Right.
Adding in hundreds of cars as far as the eye can see (i.e.: reality) wouldn't make for a pretty picture.
There's another irritating curiosity to this design. The galleries, and therefore the people visiting them, are visible to the outside -- to motorists, pedestrians, and workers in the adjoining buildings. If you are a museum patron, you can be observed from half a mile away. It's a little creepy. The idea of being able to curl up on a bench and commune in semi-privacy with your favorite work of art is lost.
The museum is the property of Los Angeles County, which is why the proposed public contribution of $125 million had to be debated and voted on by the Supervisors. Apparently that action made national news, but only because during the discussion, the presiding officer held one celebrity to the mandated time limit when he spoke during public comment.
At a deeper level, there were critical op eds to the tune that this structure is enormously more expensive per square foot than comparable projects in other places. One architectural critic (Joseph Giovannini) pointed out that the proposal damages the ability of the museum to carry out its rightful function. He is caustic in his view of Lacma director Michael Govan and architect Peter Zumthor.
"Stripped of necessary functions already contained by the existing buildings, the Zumthor design would be dysfunctional even without the need for off-site support space: it has no event space, classrooms, back-of-house infrastructure, storage, library, or the usual cloakroom for school children’s back packs. Even the auditorium seating has been reduced from 700 seats to 300."
But there's more. Perhaps we might consider Giovannini's critique by considering what other art museums do. For the most part (at least in my experience) museums put related works of art together. If you were to visit the Art Institute of Chicago or the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, you would find that French impressionist works are grouped, Renaissance paintings are grouped (often in several adjoining galleries) and Greek sculptures or Michelangelos likewise are grouped.
Giovannini continues: "The Zumthor design does fulfill Govan’s plan to radically change LACMA’s original mission as an encyclopedic museum—the largest west of the Mississippi—by breaking down the longstanding scholarly departments. But is that appropriate? For the proposed building, galleries are not designed to correspond to the needs of LACMA’s specific collections. Instead, according to the renderings, there are generic galleries of various sizes that will no longer accommodate departmental collections but will instead host theme shows drawn across departmental lines. The galleries will no longer distinguish between hanging a contemplative Chinese scroll versus an explosive Anselm Kiefer or a high-energy Lucian Freud. And despite owning 130,000 artworks, dating back to archaic times, LACMA will no longer be a multi-cultural teaching museum but a string of galleries that will lose their scope, their focus and their authority."
What critics have also been pointing out is that LACMA will actually lose floor space by tearing down the four buildings that are its current core and replacing them with this one-story space. Here's Giovannini on that point: "LACMA’s proposed shrunken building is perhaps the most counterproductive project undertaken by any museum in America over the last generation; in terms of space lost for the price paid, it’s highly questionable whether Los Angeles can afford the cultural cost of building it."
I'd like to offer my own view on something that doesn't seem to be getting enough attention. In recent visits, I found that the food concessions were priced at a fairly expensive level more consistent with the upscale westside than with an institution that is owned by the public and ought to be serving the needs of all the people of Los Angeles County. It would be nice if less affluent families could expose their children to art and culture (the kids get in free, so that works) and get them a hot dog before getting back on the subway. Other cities manage to accomplish this.
I tossed in that part about getting on the subway for a reason. Perhaps the best aspect of the new project is that it is supposed to be timed to open to the public right when the Metro station for the new rail line opens across the street. The idea of a serious museum that is available by mass transit from the east side is definitely a plus. Of course, it would be a plus if the current structures remain for a few more years in anticipation of a different design, but it's indicative of Los Angeles trying to move into a post-petroleum age.
By the way, the museum has recently raised its price of admission for adults to $20 for residents of LA County. It's five dollars higher if you don't live in the county. Is it the proper function of county government to spend your sales tax dollars in order to enable this kind of system?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
