LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a public institution since 1961, when the art collection was moved out of the stairwells of the Science Museum in Expo Park. Like the Science Museum, and like baseball and soccer fields, libraries, parks, nature paths, water fountains, public emergency rooms, safe beaches, and family-friendly picnic tables, the County’s mission for the art collection as it grew was to keep it available free or pull-ticket-cheap to anybody, any day of the week. My God does that sound bloody noble today.
Q: How do you turn a dusty public art collection into a prohibitively expensive elite commodity only the rich get to enjoy? A: Build an expensive new museum, and lock it up inside!
https://laist.com/2020/09/18/lacma_unveils_inside_look_at_its_new_750-million_expansion.php
The latest breathless projection into the Orwellian future of a plan that was already out of date and controversial before Coronavirus. The push to replace LACMA has had a bloated design process, going through many, many starchitects in the past few years, with costs getting ever more gigantic. Plus the HUGE carbon footprint attached. At least the design, at last, is pretty. But why build it at all?
LACMA has been under constant construction ever since I arrived in LA, and access to the collection has been woefully limited, mostly because “these old galleries are too small for the collection.” So they’d build a new building with much closure and re-opening fanfare. Each new pavilion or plaza, while individually okay, was seemingly selected to be totally at war with what came before it. Then two years later you’d start reading again about a major re-fit. Now, they aren’t even bothering to keep the art accessible at all, the collection has been crated up in storage for a few years now. It’s being held essentially for ransom; we’ll have to see that the new building gets its financing and permits, because they’ve already torn down the old ones. [Peremptory tear-downs being the old Trump Management trick, by the way.]
They released some new sketches to get us all excited. But after Coronavirus, this seems like a parody ad from the fifties of a gleaming future where art is important because it’s expensive, and it’s expensive because it’s important. It’s being built at tremendous cost even though right now, it’s unclear anybody may ever willingly visit a dead-air public space again. And even if there’s a vaccine, with the economic disaster, Americans, will find it tough for years to afford hundred-dollar admission prices. So it seems they’re building this sexy new building specifically to have a reason to justify luring tourists in numbers large enough to justify charging them a hundred bucks to visit this really sexy building. It might as well be the concourse of an airport, to process timed trips to Venus, to see the 2.4 trillion-dollar Van Gogh that’s already on your coffee mug.
The trend of huge echoey ware-house spaces for everything is not good for art. The idea being sold is, the curators will be constantly shifting art around the deliberately amorphous galleries, to make fabulous ever-changing moments in the fabulous ever-changing space they’re building. So who knows what we’ll get to see? The public — returning visitors — local citizens — us — have lost forever the chance to view, and get to know, our art collection, over long years, even generations, during many delightful visits. That is one of the best services any art museum can perform. Otherwise, the public is removed from feelings of connection and ownership. Individuals, particularly the poor, lose interest and inspiration. We lose the casual habit of art, of having day-to-day relationship with certain works, which is indispensable for civilization. We lose the tickle of coming back to get lost in a loved painting or artist, just because you had a free afternoon. Now the managing curatorial experts own the art, and will dangle bits of it temporarily before you, then snatch it away somewhere. If you assume your passive position in a long queue hours before the showtime, you’ll eventually get in and get a whole three-minute pass; if during that pass you are jostled from behind by a stroller, or don’t look up from your cell-phone, you’ll miss it forever, whatever it was. Next.
The way to save the future of Nature and our connection to it, and art and our connection to it, is to NOT build museums as “tourist events” — de-natured, multi-purpose, ever-changing, where-has-that-painting-gone, but-look-there’s-a-yoghurt stand, white-Star-Wars-plastic, airport-anomic crowd-processors. Can’t you just hear the squeals of children racing around? The piercing squeak! of sneakers on marble floors, the coughs and sneezes, the grunts and protestations of a thousand cell-phone conversations twittering all around you in a Babel of languages? You will. Not a breath of fresh air that doesn’t come already stale from the ducts. Not a window that could ever be opened. In LA.
Paintings, recall, are best seen indoors, in controlled light, well spaced but in curatorial communication with each other, and kept shaded and at constant temperature, where silence or hush is preserved, so that an individual or a class of students can find their own (collective) privacy to contemplate individual art objects. Exactly like the 1960s ’70’s and ’80’s galleries they’ve torn down. Indeed, Zumthor’s big design concept is: We wanted glass windows facing south so the sun bakes the canyon-sized concourse, requiring constant air conditioning….so the art goes in the usual small, boring, dark galleries at the back. What a design innovation!
Injury: this isn’t being financed cost-free through the public bank. Nope, it’s Wall Street. Kids of kids yet unborn will be floating this debt, a large multiple of the $750 million. For a County art collection donated in 1910.
Insult to injury: In the article above, read how the spokesperson coyly admits when this fantasy crowd-processor is built, it will be mostly empty because its capacity dwarfs the current art collection. Chuckle, “I guess we’ll have to go on a big art-buying spree to fill the barn!”
The Valley Village View 