Last Saturday night in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (known locally as LACMA), particularly its newest addition, the travertine-marble clad Renzo Piano designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum (already known as BCAM –pronounced bee-cam) had its star-studded opening.
There were more than 1,100 guests, not only from the area but also from all over the United States and Europe, as well prominent entertainment industry figures, artists, executives and civic leaders who gathered for the grand occasion. They entered on a red carpet by greeted by costumed stilt-walkers to the sound of Taiko drums. Think guests arriving for Oscar night and you get the picture.
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Eli and Edythe Broad |
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Tables for the dinner ran from $25,000 (silver), $50,000 (gold) to $100,000 (platinum), and the event raised more than $5 million. There were museum directors from all over too: Nicholas Serota of Britain's Tate Gallery, Earl A. "Rusty" Powell III of the National Gallery of Art (and former LACMA director), Thomas Krens of Guggenheim Museums Worldwide and from L.A.’s MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), the Getty, the Hammer and other local institutions. And there were artists, such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Damien Hirst, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Richard Serra, Robert Graham, Ed Ruscha, all of whom have works on display in BCAM. And of course, Edythe and Eli Broad, the benefactors of the newest addition to this sprawling museum that now resides on what is called a “campus” of buildings on a plot just a block away from the famous La Brea Tar Pits where ancient mammals, predators and prey were trapped, died and were fossilized for the world to continue to see and contemplate.
Mr. Broad (rhymes with road) is a Los Angeles billionaire (recent estimated net worth: $5 billion) who made his fortune in the home building business (Kaufman & Broad, now KB homes). With his wife, Edythe he donated $50 million to build this part of the museum. Originally the planners had hired Rem Koolhaus who came up with a design that would require tearing down some of the existing structures, (of course) and building a vast and mammoth edifice that would cover the entire area and cost about $300 million. No, was the answer the tax payers voted to fund the proposed project. So the Broads came in with the subsequent offer.
Mr. Broad, who began his serious collecting of contemporary art in the early 1980s, has amassed a collection of more than two thousand pieces. It was widely believed that his fifty million donation would be followed with a donation of his collection, more or less. However, just before the opening, he announced that he would NOT be donating his collectcion to the new museum bearing his name, but only LENDING pieces of it. The entire collection would remain with the Eli Broad Foundation.
There was quite a to-do in the art world about this decision, much of which did not favor Mr. Broad and his decision. However, it became clear that after spending his millions acquiring art, the collector was not about to hand it over to generations of highly paid, self-important managers to trade around the acquisitions at their will and leisure. So now the Eli Broad Foundation will be in charge and can lend parts of its collections to museums and exhibitions all over the world, including to the new BCAM. Everybody is now more or less happy.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a municipal museum, unlike many of the important museums of the world. Its employees are municipal employees, and so it is governed by a county charter that many think inhibits its progress. It has vast and important collections of all kinds, but the government charter doesn’t give it the opportunities that private museums have. For example, two years ago it had been displaying the famous Klimt gold portrait of Vienna aristocrat Adele Bloch-Bauer, which had been looted by the Nazis and returned to a Los Angeles woman and her relatives. When they decided to sell the picture, LACMA was unable to raise the funds to buy it and it went to Ronald Lauder and his new museum Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million.
As a result of moments such as this, and because its development as a major museum is only thirty or forty years old, LACMA is often regarded as somewhat of a stepsister to the world class museums. This attitude is a creaky one that reflects more the earlier cultural growing pains of a city that is now a major world metropolis than the reality. Two years ago, the museum appointed Michael Govan as Director and CEO. |
