Broad Contemporary Art Museum
"Broad Contemporary Art Museum" by Edward Rubin, Summer 2008, pp. 82-3
With just about every city in the world building a new art museum, or enlarging or renovating an old one, the question remains: did Los Angeles need another temple of contemporary art? Well, the 75-year-old Eli Broad, the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Los Angeles, thought so, and like George Patton, the Second World War general with whom Broad has compared himself, he charged ahead and built the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. No matter that the new building—the centrepiece and first phase of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s $300-million-plus, three-phase, ten-year makeover—would belong to Los Angeles County lock, stock and barrel, the billionaire philanthropist selected the architect, put up $56 million for construction and threw in another $10 million for acquisitions. Just as generously, he allowed LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, and Lynn Zelevansky, its curator of contemporary art, to choose from his enormous personal art collection whatever works they wanted for the new museum’s inaugural exhibition. They selected 176 works.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished, and the critics, led most vociferously by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, did everything in their power to wrestle Broad and the museum’s architect, Renzo Piano (of Centre Pompidou fame), to the ground. The complainers insisted that the building’s travertine-clad face, despite its spidery red trimming, is too staid, the museum’s entry plaza resembles a gas station—the irony being that BP financed it, to the tune of $25 million—and the art collection itself, though mostly predictable for a man of Broad’s age, wealth, ethnicity and business acumen, was far too white. Worse than that! Of the 30 artists whose works grace the walls of the new museum, only four are women, Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only non-white and Damien Hirst the only foreigner; no less accusatory, most of the artists on view are or have been represented by Larry Gagosian.
While these were the headlines, the backstory is more complicated. Broad, a long-time trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum, on whose 20-acre, seven-building campus BCAM sits, is also a trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a life trustee and founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, plus, as of 2004, sits on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute, the latter by appointment of Congress and President George W. Bush—and for years has been dangling his mammoth art collection in the faces of various museums, LACMA included. To make matters worse, just before the museum’s official February opening, he announced that he was not going to part with his personal collection of some 400 paintings but was instead adding them to the holdings (more than 1,500 paintings) of his private foundation. The reason: Broad preferred his foundation to lend its 2,000 works to museums around the world and have them shown rather than have 90% of his collection end up in the basement of a single museum.
Shortcomings and complaints aside, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum—a serious bid by the city of Los Angeles to join, if not trump, New York and London as the world’s centre of contemporary art—offers a number of pleasant surprises in its building, grounds and first exhibition. Topping the list is Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a delightful array of 202 vintage Los Angeles street lamps tightly lined up in 12 rows, looking like candles on a square birthday cake. This permanent installation, a knockout at night when it is all lit up, is the first work of contemporary art that the public sees upon entering the museum’s plaza. Behind the lampposts, playfully traversing the side of the building, is a bright red escalator, which makes a scenic 50-foot run to the museum’s third floor, where the exhibition begins. Here, under a gentle, light-emitting glass ceiling, the work of Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Kelly, Twombly, Ruscha, Warhol and Koons, all multi-million-dollar blue chips, holds court. The dominating artist in terms of quantity as well as space occupied is Jeff Koons, who is Broad’s closest friend among the artists he collects. Strangely enough, Koons’s kitsch porcelain sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), for a long time something of a joke, is beginning to look important, to be followed one day perhaps by his fluorescent vacuum cleaners, floating basketballs and giant floral puppies.
On the second floor are the usual suspects of the 1980s—Basquiat, Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, Bleckner, Holzer and Sherman. The surprise is the Cindy Sherman room, in which 49 of her film-still self-portraits are hung from floor to ceiling. Commanding more space than they deserved were nine works by Damien Hirst, the museum’s biggest nod to the art of the 1990s. Most intriguing among them was The Collector (2003–05), a room-size glass vitrine complete with an animatronic scientist bending over a microscope, flowering plants and live butterflies. Most embarrassing was The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2003), a triptych imitating a Gothic stained-glass window made from thousands of butterfly wings. As one critic quipped, it is a “Martha Stewart craft project on steroids.” Concluding the exhibition on the first floor, under a ceiling too low to do them justice, were two of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures, Sequence (2006) and Band (2006).
As I exited the museum I recalled a telling statement by the artist Barbara Kruger, whose texts and images line the museum’s glass-fronted elevator shaft: “Plenty should be enough.” Broadly speaking, it is.
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