UCLA Broad Art Center opens! "LA is one of the great art capitals of the world" [Archive]

citywatch

09-20-2006, 08:51 AM

George Lucas to Give USC Film School $175 Million

The filmmaker's gift, for a new cinema program home, is the largest ever to the university.

By Stuart Silverstein, Times Staff Writer
September 20, 2006

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas is giving USC a blockbuster donation of $175 million — the university's biggest single gift ever — that largely will be used to build a new home for its prestigious film school, campus officials confirmed Tuesday. The gift from his Lucasfilm Foundation builds on Hollywood's historic support for the cinema school, where Lucas earned a bachelor's degree.

Much of the donation is to pay for a 137,000-square-foot complex. According to preliminary information provided to Los Angeles city officials, it would be designed to evoke the architecture of the era when the film school was founded in 1929. That new centerpiece building will expand its current cramped quarters and provide modern facilities that could boost the school's stepped-up emphasis on merging Hollywood storytelling skills with emerging multimedia technologies.

USC's previous top gift, $120 million, came in 1993 from the late ambassador and publisher Walter Annenberg. The record for U.S. higher education overall was a gift totaling $600 million to Caltech in 2001, with half of the money from Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, and the rest coming from their foundation.

USC officials, who planned to announce the $175-million donation and building project at a groundbreaking ceremony Oct. 4, released a 10-paragraph news release Tuesday afternoon in response to inquiries from The Times.

In the release, Lucas said, "I discovered my passion for film and making movies when I was a student at USC in the 1960s, and my experiences there shaped the rest of my career. I'm also an ardent advocate for education at all levels, and encouraging young people to pursue their ambitions by learning. I'm very fortunate to be in a position to combine my two passions and to be able to help USC continue molding the futures of the moviemakers of tomorrow."

Lucas, 62, began his college classes at Modesto Junior College but completed his studies at USC in 1966.

City officials said the new building would go up on the north side of the campus. It would be partly on a parking lot south of 34th Street near McClintock Avenue, but the project also would involve tearing down one or more campus buildings. University spokesmen would not say how much of the $175 million already has been received, over how many years it will be given and what else the money would be used for besides the new complex and other film school renovations.

One subtle sign of change for the film school came in spring. USC officials, in one behind-the-scenes move, altered the university's bylaws in April partly to change the school's name from the USC School of Cinema-Television to the School of Cinematic Arts. The switch dovetails with the institution's growing focus on new digital technologies.

The university tipped its hand further in recent days by sending groundbreaking ceremony invitations — albeit ones that kept the donor's name secret — to civic leaders, university officials and professors. The invitation credits USC with "a long and proud history of inspiring and teaching the artists, scholars, and entrepreneurs who shape film, television and interactive media in the 20th century.

"This fall, we invite you to join us in carrying that tradition through the 21st century as we celebrate and break ground on our 137,000-square-foot state-of-the-art complex, made possible through the largest gift ever" to the university.

The Lucas donation is another in a series of fundraising coups for the university administration under President Steven B. Sample. USC in 2003 wrapped up a 9 1/2 -year fundraising campaign that collected $2.85 billion in gifts and pledges — the biggest ever for a U.S. university, until UCLA announced in February that it collected $3.05 billion in its 10 1/2 -year campaign.

Donations and pledges have continued to flow into USC in the last three years, totaling $4.2 billion since Sample arrived at USC in 1991. Those gifts, in turn, have helped pay for initiatives that have substantially boosted USC's reputation in academic circles.

Since 1991, the university has moved up in the closely watched U.S. News & World Report magazine rankings for major universities. It has gone from 48th to tied for 27th with Tufts University and the University of North Carolina in the 2007 rankings released last month. UCLA, once well ahead of USC, was ranked just one notch higher in the latest poll, at 26th.

Lucas, chairman of San Francisco-based Lucasfilm Ltd. and also known for his Indiana Jones movies and the semiautobiographical "American Graffiti," has ample wealth to pay for his philanthropy. On last year's Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, Lucas was tied for 61st, with an estimated net worth of $3.5 billion.

He was unavailable for comment late Tuesday but, in a separate morning ceremony, he gained another measure of renown: Lucas was named the grand marshal of the 2007 Rose Parade in Pasadena.

Lucas has long been involved with the film school, serving on its board of councilors, and two buildings on campus bear the Lucas family name. The film school, established 67 years ago as a collaboration between USC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, long has been cited as one of the nation's best. In its most recent ranking of graduate film programs, U.S. News in 1997 rated USC tied with New York University for first place, with UCLA a close third. USC boasts that every year since 1973 at least one of its former students has been nominated for an Academy Award.

The new funds could give the film school another lift. "There is no question that a gift in excess of $100 million is a transformational gift for an institution. It gives the university, and in this case the film school, wonderful opportunities to add a margin of excellence to the institution, to really distinguish it," said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, which represents fundraising officials at 3,200 schools.

fflint

09-20-2006, 02:53 PM

UCLA Celebrates Its New Art Center
Eli and Edythe Broad donated almost half of the $52-million cost for the teaching, work and exhibition spaces.

By Scott Timberg, Times Staff Writer
September 14, 2006

A new building that UCLA's acting chancellor dubbed a "magnificent edifice" was unveiled at the Westwood campus Wednesday morning during a ceremony that drew about 200 well-wishers, with speaking roles by philanthropist Eli Broad, state First Lady Maria Shriver and Getty Center architect Richard Meier.

The university is billing the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, which opens to the public today, as "Los Angeles' newest cultural destination." The structure, though, is actually a $52-million adaptive reuse of the old, unlovely Dickson Art Center, and will be of use mostly to university faculty and students in the visual arts programs of the School of Arts and Architecture.

Broad, whose foundation donated $23.2 million of the cost, said "the gift combines three of our passions: education, the arts and Los Angeles." The building includes exhibition galleries for the departments of art and design/media arts and is, Broad said, another step in the city's emergence as the world's fourth cultural capital alongside Paris, New York and London.

"Some people say, 'Why support the arts with all the other human needs?' " he said. "I don't think we remember the lawyers or the accountants. But we sure remember the architects and the artists."

The Broad Center is set near a rearranged 5-acre sculpture garden that includes works by Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin and Alexander Calder. Adjacent, in the Broad Center's courtyard, is a new 14-foot-high, 42.5-ton "torqued ellipse" work by Richard Serra, perhaps the best-regarded living sculptor.

Serra, who seemed to glower in his black suit during the morning's speeches, came alive behind the lectern and spoke of the honor of placing a work on the UCLA campus. He said he hoped the piece would "empower" students to create their own boldly original work.

In contrast to William Pereira's Dickson Art Center, which was gloomy and marked by a long central corridor, the new building is light and open, and offers large studios in which students can work.

As the event broke up after a ribbon cutting, Meier & Partners architect Michael Palladino discussed how he was originally faced, seven years ago, with an old building that felt visually and structurally heavy. His solution was to bring several of the main walkways outside and to line the windows of the upper floors with wood louvers.

Despite problems with the original building's layout and facade, Palladino said, "the basic proportions and orientation were ideal," allowing him to save the original concrete frame. Palladino is the head of the L.A. office of Meier & Partners, the firm that designed the Getty Center.

Shriver called the building a "feast for the eye" and poked fun at Broad for his obsession with Los Angeles at the expense of the rest of the state.

For UCLA brass, this marks the first time the arts departments "have facilities that match the quality of our programs," in the words of arts and architecture dean Christopher Waterman.

UCLA's art program has indeed become among of the nation's most prestigious, in part because of a faculty that includes artists John Baldessari, Lari Pittman and Catherine Opie. The Broad's galleries currently are hosting a show by the department faculty and another by the design/media arts faculty.

Were he an art student contemplating universities across the land, acting Chancellor Norman Abrams concluded, "this is the place I would want to attend."

--
On a personal note, I had a lecture class in the old Dickson Arts Center back in 2000, and it was indeed a deplorably brutal and yet unforgivably bland building. I'm glad Meier and Broad have given it an upgrade.

dimondpark

09-20-2006, 03:00 PM

Well, this UCLA alum couldnt be happier.

fflint

09-20-2006, 11:08 PM

Same here!

ucland

09-21-2006, 12:14 AM

Here here! :tup:

Vidiot

09-21-2006, 08:03 AM

its about time the USC cinema school got an overhaul.. those outdated 1970's facilities really show their age... the best cinema-television school in the world definately deserves this gift :)

LosAngelesBeauty

09-24-2006, 10:56 AM

Date: August 14, 2006
Contact: Lauren Bartlett ( lbartlett@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-1458

UCLA Is Named to the 'New Ivies' List by Kaplan/Newsweek

UCLA has been named to Kaplan and Newsweek's elite "New Ivies" list, published in the 2007 Kaplan/Newsweek "How to Get into College Guide."

This year's guide introduces for the first time the "New Ivies" — colleges whose first-rate academic programs, combined with a population boom in top students, have fueled their rise in stature and favor among the nation's top students, administrators and faculty, edging them into competitive status with Ivy League schools. UCLA was one of 25 schools selected by the magazine and test preparation service, which based their picks on admissions statistics and interviews with administrators, students, faculty and alumni. UCLA was the only public university in California selected. The 264-page Kaplan/Newsweek guide will be available in bookstores Aug. 21.

"UCLA has always been an outstanding school, but in recent years it has clearly become one of the most sought-after schools in the country; just last year alone, the number of applicants jumped by 12 percent," said Annette Riffle, contributing editor for the 2007 guide. "UCLA has been able to appeal to a growing number of the nation's top students because of its commitment to academic excellence, range of program options, variety of campus activities and desirable location, and the Kaplan/Newsweek guide is pleased to recognize this accomplishment."

In 2006, UCLA received a record 47,307 applications from prospective freshmen, a 12 percent increase over the previous year. Of those, 12,221 were admitted. Location, moderate cost for California residents and a broad variety of course choices are the draw, said Vu Tran, UCLA's director of Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools. Another draw for prospective students is that the campus guarantees housing for three years and is building more residence halls with the goal of providing housing for four years.

California's largest university, UCLA enrolls approximately 38,000 students per year and offers degrees from the UCLA College of Letters and Science and 11 professional schools in dozens of varied disciplines. UCLA consistently ranks among the top five universities and colleges nationwide in total research-and-development spending, receiving more than $820 million a year in competitively awarded federal and state grants and contracts. For every $1 state taxpayers invest in UCLA, the university generates almost $9 in economic activity, resulting in an annual $6 billion economic impact on the Greater Los Angeles region. The university's health care network treats 450,000 patients per year. UCLA employs more than 27,000 faculty and staff, has more than 350,000 living alumni and has been home to five Nobel Prize recipients.

The Agonist

09-24-2006, 03:02 PM

^Interesting. What percent of students are from out of state? I think they have to take a certain percentage to really be considered as drawing the nation's best and brightest. You can't really be considered as elite if 99% of your students are from 12% of the population.

With regards to medical schools, UCSF, UCLA and UCSD take predominantly CA residents, but they have to admit out of state applicants to be regarded as among the best in the country. I believe UCD, UCI, and UCR have almost 100% CA residents as students.

With regard to residency programs, there are no instate versus out of state differences with applicants as residency programs are funded by the federal government, so it behooves UC programs to simply interview and recruit the most outstanding applicants they can get and hope the applicants rank them high in the "match".

The UCLA Med Center has been rated the best west of the Mississippi for 19 straight years by US News based on its top notch surgical and medical subspecialties.

RAlossi

09-24-2006, 06:03 PM

I'm not too familiar with the way this works, but don't students who live in CA more than a year become CA residents in the eyes of schools?

The Agonist

09-24-2006, 07:01 PM

I'm not too familiar with the way this works, but don't students who live in CA more than a year become CA residents in the eyes of schools?

I believe they become in-state residents but don't qualify for in-state tuition nor in-state status for UC med schools, grad schools etc..

edluva

09-24-2006, 08:57 PM

I wonder how UCLA, UCSF, and UCSD compare to ivies if one considers much of the eastern seaboard a single state. California is the size of an entire region, it all just happens to be governed by one bureaucracy.

Regardless, UC grad programs churn out some of the brightest researchers in the world because they draw talent from all over the world. And it's not just about talent, it's also about cultivation - faculty have a great deal to do with the end product. And UC investigators have been rivaling ivy researchers in quality and productivity for years (partly because many are former ivy faculty themselves). In any case, grad level study (research, fellowships, etc) is where a school's standings really matters. I don't really pay heed to such ranking methodologies, even if they favor UC schools.

btw, UC grad schools (PhD) get most of their funding from the government. Their stipends are not affected by residency status.

ocman

09-24-2006, 11:12 PM

UCLA, UCB, and Stanford would be more equivalent to the ivies than UCSF and UCSD. And we can throw in Caltech which in certain ways, may be in a league of it's own in comparison to the other California school, although it would be more appropriate to compare it to MIT.

edluva

09-25-2006, 02:33 AM

UCSF can easily hang with Johns Hopkins where grad programs are concerned.

The Agonist

09-25-2006, 02:49 AM

LosAngelesBeauty

09-25-2006, 05:02 AM

fflint

09-25-2006, 05:33 AM

Well, actually--you didn't know you were a women's and children's hospital...

LosAngelesBeauty

09-25-2006, 05:50 AM

^ Yeah, I've heard of it before, just never knew much about it. *shrugs*

fflint

09-25-2006, 06:11 AM

Alas, I know it (and adjacent Mass General) only too well.

edluva

09-25-2006, 09:42 AM

^I don't know if I agree with that. I can think of multiple departments where Hopkins is far more advanced and influential than UCSF. Both Hopkins and Harvard/Brigham/MGH are a solid cut above UCSF. Hopkins is stronger than UCSF in clinical, transitional and basic research. Only Brigham/Harvard can compete with Hopkins.

Clinical perhaps, but who cares about clinical really? Heck, USC is decent at clinical if we want to look there. MD Anderson is huge. CRO's in Bulgaria, etc. Hand me enough money and I'll design an elucidative, JAMA-caliber multicentered RCT for a school of your choosing, and with great internal validity. I strongly disagree about basic/translational though. If anything it's the other way around - UCSF's Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, and Cell bio departments are probably more highly regarded than are John Hopkins'. As far as translational, UCSF is a clear cut above JH, or pretty much any other in many programs. It's pharmaceutics and pharm/tox departments are unsurpassable. For example, those departments pretty much defined modern clinical PK/PD as we know it. UCSF all but created the study of pharmacogenomics, and continues to lead it. Then you get the interdepartmental collaborations like PSPG and QB3. There are so many top-tier basic research programs at UCSF that one can't possibly make such a generalization that one is a "cut above" another. Even the NIH grants between JH and UCSF are neck and neck, whether in terms of fellowships, R&D contracts, or research grants. The only area UCSF clearly lags Johns Hopkins is in its offerings - UCSF isn't the all-encompassing university JH is, since it's strictly health/life-sci. Where JH really shines is anything relating to health policy/economics. That's where it starts playing with Harvard.

As far as clinical med is concerned, I'd think you'd have to start looking by subspecialty, but I'll defer to your expertise on that.

I can't speak for Harvard/MGH as I don't know as much about it, but I've heard a lot about their programs. I figure though, that given what I do know about how UCSF's and JH's programs compare, it can't be *that* much better. I guess I just don't buy into the culture and hype associated with eastern institutions as much as others.

The Agonist

09-26-2006, 05:24 AM

Clinical perhaps, but who cares about clinical really? Heck, USC is decent at clinical if we want to look there. MD Anderson is huge. CRO's in Bulgaria, etc. Hand me enough money and I'll design an elucidative, JAMA-caliber multicentered RCT for a school of your choosing, and with great internal validity. I strongly disagree about basic/translational though. If anything it's the other way around - UCSF's Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, and Cell bio departments are probably more highly regarded than are John Hopkins'. As far as translational, UCSF is a clear cut above JH, or pretty much any other in many programs. It's pharmaceutics and pharm/tox departments are unsurpassable. For example, those departments pretty much defined modern clinical PK/PD as we know it. UCSF all but created the study of pharmacogenomics, and continues to lead it. Then you get the interdepartmental collaborations like PSPG and QB3. There are so many top-tier basic research programs at UCSF that one can't possibly make such a generalization that one is a "cut above" another. Even the NIH grants between JH and UCSF are neck and neck, whether in terms of fellowships, R&D contracts, or research grants. The only area UCSF clearly lags Johns Hopkins is in its offerings - UCSF isn't the all-encompassing university JH is, since it's strictly health/life-sci. Where JH really shines is anything relating to health policy/economics. That's where it starts playing with Harvard.

As far as clinical med is concerned, I'd think you'd have to start looking by subspecialty, but I'll defer to your expertise on that.

I can't speak for Harvard/MGH as I don't know as much about it, but I've heard a lot about their programs. I figure though, that given what I do know about how UCSF's and JH's programs compare, it can't be *that* much better. I guess I just don't buy into the culture and hype associated with eastern institutions as much as others.

I can't speak with any expertise on molecular biology, cell biology, biochem depts. So I absolutely believe that UCSF is as outstanding as any in the world.

I'd like to think I don't buy into the "east coast = good, west coast = not as good" mentality, but I think I must kind of do as I look at my colleagues who grew up in So Cal and went to Cal tech with a MD/PhD from UCLA in not the same light as the ones who grew up round here and went to Princeton and got an MD/PhD from HMS. The latter have a much brighter glow to them in my eyes.

But back to Brigham. Brigham competely overmatches UCSF, and that's quite impressive that a single man can out compete a university of 1000s of students, faculty and staff.

svs

09-26-2006, 05:45 AM

. LA does lag other cities a bit in terms of performing arts, but that gap is sure to narrow in the coming years. Still though, it does take time for the cultural reputation of a city like LA to reflect reality--at least 10 years I'd guess, if not moreso.

.

What do you mean, LA lags in performing arts? IF you look at the listings in aany thursday edition of the LA times, you will usually see over 100 and usually over 120 plays being performed in the city on any one week. actually the number of productions in the LA area out numbers the number of productions anywhere in the USA, including New York, although the productions in NYC are more elaborate as a rule and may play for years as opposed to LA productions which usually play for weeks or months. None the less most LA productions feature professional actors with their union cards.

There are three opera companies and new symphony hallls/performing arts centers have been built in downtown and Orange county recently. I am told there are more than 30 symphonic groups in the area including the prestigeous LA Phil, but also including the Hollywood bowl symphony, Pasadena symphony, glendale symph, Santa Monica Symphonia, LA chamber Orch, Orch Pacifica, etc. etc. USC, UCLA, and Cal tech have performing schedules. There are multiple performing arts centers all over the area including LOng Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, the Hollywood Bowl, etc. We are a little weak in homegrown classical ballet, but all the visiting companies come regularly, and as for non classical music, there are hundreds of clubs for live performance including most big names, In the US only New York can be said to have a more vital performing arts scene than LA.

The reason many don't ralize this is that our venues tend to be scattered across the metropolis, rather then located in a few areas. If you don't believe be, check out the Thursday calender section in the LA Times, or check out the LA weekly.

And that doesn't even count the tapings of TV shows open to the public,

bobcat

09-26-2006, 06:00 AM

DJM19

09-26-2006, 06:06 AM

Where does the MO get its funds? Donations?

LA need more philanthropy. So many rich people live here.

bobcat

09-26-2006, 06:25 AM

^Yes, other, more established, cities like NYC, SF, CHI, etc have a greater tradition of philanthropy than LA does. Also, cities which have an established tradition in the arts tend to draw many tourists who make up a significant portion of the audience at cultural venues. I mean, it seems like everyone who visits NYC goes to a museum, play, or concert, whereas that's not the case in LA, although that's begun to change in recent years. Of course, that's one of Eli Broad's major goals--to increase the amount of cultural tourism to the area.

citywatch

09-26-2006, 06:53 AM

I'd like to think I don't buy into the "east coast = good, west coast = not as good" mentality, but I think I must kind of do as I look at my colleagues who grew up in So Cal and went to Cal tech with a MD/PhD from UCLA in not the same light as the ones who grew up round here and went to Princeton and got an MD/PhD from HMS. The latter have a much brighter glow to them in my eyes. Snob! :D

But I do think you're pointing out a problem that is partly related to some of the comments in the "Cover Story: Next LA" thread (http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=110001&page=5).

I remember reading an article several yrs ago written by a former director of the Metropolitan Museum in NY about his trip to CA. He visited LA & SF, & even though the main museum he toured in SF isn't all that good (esp compared with the place where he worked), or certainly no better than the museums he visited in LA, he nonetheless described the place in SF in more positive terms, while sounding less enthusiastic about or impressed by what he saw in LA.

I think ppl are more likely to discount the importance of things, even in their own backyard, if they associate them as being part of an armpit setting, one that's full of dives & deadzones. Consequently, even though I believe LA is far better than, for example, San Diego in cultural & social matters, a lot of ppl (even at SSP) still have more positive impressions of SD, & prob things connected with it, than LA. And if that's true of SD compared with LA, then it would be even truer of SF compared with LA, since snobs have long equated SF as being the center of culture on the West Coast.

edluva

09-26-2006, 07:25 AM

I can't speak with any expertise on molecular biology, cell biology, biochem depts. So I absolutely believe that UCSF is as outstanding as any in the world.

I'd like to think I don't buy into the "east coast = good, west coast = not as good" mentality, but I think I must kind of do as I look at my colleagues who grew up in So Cal and went to Cal tech with a MD/PhD from UCLA in not the same light as the ones who grew up round here and went to Princeton and got an MD/PhD from HMS. The latter have a much brighter glow to them in my eyes.

I guess there's 2 ways to look at it. One is where the results speak for themselves. The other is by the "glow" in the eyes of a given investigator. No but seriously, I know that glow, though I'm not convinced it actually yields results. It could very well be the product of one's association with prestige, and nothing more. I look at it this way... if west coast institutions can compete with eastern counterparts for sought-after funding, nobels, fellows, patents, and more, whether or not they do it in style doesn't change the outcome. If michael bishop can characterize a prion before anyone else does, it shouldn't matter how magically his eyes sparkle.

The thing is, with mol bio, cell bio, biochem, pharma, toxicology, and med chem taken care of, I can't see anywhere else JH's case for dominating basic and translational sciences can be made. These are pretty much all the big topics. Sure, JH gets ranked higher in medicine, but by what, one notch? two? three? (if rankings matter that is). Either way, I just get the feeling most of the purported difference is imaginary. Not to be too boring about it of course.

LosAngelesBeauty

09-26-2006, 08:14 AM

^ Whatever is exotic will appeal to the glow in people's eyes.

When I was in Chicago, I bumped into a guy at a bar who was moving to LA in a couple of weeks. As he bumped into people he knew inside the bar, he told them he was leaving for LA. The reaction from people in the bar was the same as if someone from LA was moving to Chicago. "WOW! OMG, really? LA! Wow you're soo lucky!"

My friend who went to Cornell told me that many of his friends from the East Coast that have never visited LA would be fascinated by his stories of LA. It's whatever is exotic that gets people's eyes glistening.

RAlossi

09-26-2006, 03:46 PM

When I was in Chicago, I bumped into a guy at a bar who was moving to LA in a couple of weeks. As he bumped into people he knew inside the bar, he told them he was leaving for LA. The reaction from people in the bar was the same as if someone from LA was moving to Chicago. "WOW! OMG, really? LA! Wow you're soo lucky!"

Now change that venue to a bar in New York, and the reaction will be.... ":yuck:"

svs

09-28-2006, 11:43 PM

^I'm fully aware of what LA has to offer, but I'm comparing LA to cities like NYC and London, which I consider to be its peers. Just take opera as an example. The Metropolitan Opera has a budget of over $200 million and presents upwards of 30 different operas a season. LA Opera, while respectable, has a budget this year in the range of $50-55 million and presenting 8 operas. That's actually comparable to Chicago and San Francisco, but as far as I'm concerned LA Opera should be aiming much higher.

Contrast that with the visual arts, where LA does rival NYC. There are actually a lot of artists who believe LA is #1 for contemporary art.

LA is comparible to London and NY in the number of productions performed yearly in the city. When you add in the audience seats for the TV shows, it probably beats them in total numbers. I admit the productions play longer and are more elaborate in London and NY, but they are supported by tourists from all over the world. Most tourists have no idea of what is available in LA.
As for Opera, while admitting no one in the US can hold a candle to the met, I would point out that this week there are four operas playing locally, Don Carlo, Manon, the Peony Pavillion, and Porgy and Bess, (multiple companies including touring productions), and The Kirov "Ring" all of it is coming to Orange County next week. I would rather hear the LA PHil under Essa-Peka in the Disney Hall than the NY Phil at LIncoln center under anyone. Just a personal opinion.

As for popular music, comedy, and performing arts LA is the equal of London and NY. Check the listings. The only place LA really is behind is dance. No real classical ballet company, and we tend to depend on visiting troups. Still there is a lot more performing art in LA than most people realize. If the tourists would catch on, we could have a theater scene better than New York or even London.

bobcat

09-29-2006, 12:01 AM

LA is comparible to London and NY in the number of productions performed yearly in the city. When you add in the audience seats for the TV shows, it probably beats them in total numbers. I admit the productions play longer and are more elaborate in London and NY, but they are supported by tourists from all over the world. Most tourists have no idea of what is available in LA.

Having attended a number of TV tapings before, I can't honestly call that attending a cultural event. The experience seems more technical than artistic.

As for Opera, while admitting no one in the US can hold a candle to the met, I would point out that this week there are four operas playing locally, Don Carlo, Manon, the Peony Pavillion, and Porgy and Bess, (multiple companies including touring productions), and The Kirov "Ring" all of it is coming to Orange County next week.

That's great. But there are also numerous weeks throughout the year when there isn't any opera offered at all. It's something LA needs to work on.

I would rather hear the LA PHil under Essa-Peka in the Disney Hall than the NY Phil at LIncoln center under anyone. Just a personal opinion.

I'm in agreement.

As for popular music, comedy, and performing arts LA is the equal of London and NY. Check the listings. The only place LA really is behind is dance. No real classical ballet company, and we tend to depend on visiting troups. Still there is a lot more performing art in LA than most people realize. If the tourists would catch on, we could have a theater scene better than New York or even London.

You are contradicting yourself. First you say that LA is equal to NYC and London in performing arts, then say it's not quite as good in opera, dance and maybe theater. What's so wrong with admitting LA not quite at their level yet? No need for this defensiveness. LA will get there in time, and sooner than most people think I reckon.

Infestma

09-29-2006, 12:45 AM

I just read on Fortune that Broad, LACMA, and some others had offered a bid for all the Klimt paintings... The price they offered was $150 million for all of them and they refused to go more because their higher priority was the new building expansions plus they thought the owner of the paintings would give them a bit of a break since LACMA paid for all the costs to have it get to LA. I thought I'd let you guys know, in case you weren't aware of this and that apparently some work was done by our guys to try to keep those paintings.

ocman

09-29-2006, 05:08 AM

I can't speak with any expertise on molecular biology, cell biology, biochem depts. So I absolutely believe that UCSF is as outstanding as any in the world.

I'd like to think I don't buy into the "east coast = good, west coast = not as good" mentality, but I think I must kind of do as I look at my colleagues who grew up in So Cal and went to Cal tech with a MD/PhD from UCLA in not the same light as the ones who grew up round here and went to Princeton and got an MD/PhD from HMS. The latter have a much brighter glow to them in my eyes.

But back to Brigham. Brigham competely overmatches UCSF, and that's quite impressive that a single man can out compete a university of 1000s of students, faculty and staff.

Harvard over UCLA med school, definitely. But Princeton over Caltech? "The "glow" is not so agreed upon. Princeton has a more famous "brand" among the American civilians, but internationally and among educators/academics, I'd say Caltech is more prestigious and impressive. I'd bet that there is a different type of "snob" factor of those who cater to Caltech's crowd over Princeton's. . And keeping in mind that this is a discussion about perception of prestige beyond the reality of whether Caltech and Harvard is better than UCLA/Princeton in whatever academic areas.

ocman

09-29-2006, 06:21 AM

LA is comparible to London and NY in the number of productions performed yearly in the city. When you add in the audience seats for the TV shows, it probably beats them in total numbers. I admit the productions play longer and are more elaborate in London and NY, but they are supported by tourists from all over the world. Most tourists have no idea of what is available in LA.
As for Opera, while admitting no one in the US can hold a candle to the met, I would point out that this week there are four operas playing locally, Don Carlo, Manon, the Peony Pavillion, and Porgy and Bess, (multiple companies including touring productions), and The Kirov "Ring" all of it is coming to Orange County next week. I would rather hear the LA PHil under Essa-Peka in the Disney Hall than the NY Phil at LIncoln center under anyone. Just a personal opinion.

As for popular music, comedy, and performing arts LA is the equal of London and NY. Check the listings. The only place LA really is behind is dance. No real classical ballet company, and we tend to depend on visiting troups. Still there is a lot more performing art in LA than most people realize. If the tourists would catch on, we could have a theater scene better than New York or even London.

LA Phil, ever since the new concert hall, has become the hottest ticket among symphonies. It's all about the conductor, and LA has the most acclaimed conductor, atleast here in the US. So I'd say that it's just recently reached that elite level with the NY Phil. With the LA Opera, it was founded in the 1986 and still has some ways to go, but the amount of attention and philanthropy behind it is enviable.

edluva

09-29-2006, 07:30 AM

ocman

09-29-2006, 08:10 AM

Can anyone really justify paying $100 million dollars for a single painting? That's just ridiculous. LACMA came to it's senses. That's probably about 10 times their endowment. That would have been completely irresponsible.

edluva

09-29-2006, 10:02 PM

adele bloch blauer wasn't just a single painting. It might have done more for LACMA than the current 175 million dollar expansion ever will. And the fact that Broad is our only philanthropist to fall on. Michael Govan said it right - in NY, the billionaire class competes to see who can put more money into the arts. Not so in LA. Civic culture is really important. LA is has grouping of billionaires who happen to live in a single place. Just like the rest of the city, it's schizophrenic and dissociative. NY, in contrast, has an actual society.

ocman

09-30-2006, 12:26 AM

If would have done more for LACMA, but it still isn't worth the price. It had a disappointing amount of visitors during it's stay at LACMA, when we had all 5 or 6 paintings. If the tourists didn't come for 5, why would they come for 1? It's different if it was the Getty who could actually afford it. But for LACMA, it'd be a better museum if it spent that money expanding it's collection with ten good paintings that would improve the overall experience of LACMA, then cashing out on a one trick pony. 175 million on the museum infrastructure on the other hand, is a good investment. LACMA' biggest problem is that it's a jumbled mess that is anything but fun to navigate. LA's biggest problem isn't the people willing to spend money on art, it's that musuems like the Getty don't care to form relationships with people who have good collections who could potentially donate their art. It's about donation. They jump ship and donate to NY museums. The fact that LA could even think about spending 100 million on a painting says that money isn't the issue in LA's art world (even the Met wouldn't pay that much), it's LA's inability to get mentioned in a dead collector's will, who live in our own backyard.

edluva

09-30-2006, 07:52 AM

LA didn't think about paying 100m for a painting. Eli Broad did. The painting was willed to the family of the painting's subject, and that family happened to move to LA when the Nazi's invaded Austria. It was never intended to be willed to a US museum. The Altman family sold this painting to a NY buyer who was willing to pay the price. In this case, no LA collector would. That's the disappointment.

But yeah, I wouldn't ever have expected LACMA to put up that kind of money for it. It's a poor museum. But I knew a private collector would. Only this one lives in NY.

Either way, LACMA can gain patronage through publicity. And there are 2 ways it can gain publicity - through the fanfare that only McRenzo can promise, or through the fame of having our very own Mona Lisa...our very own destination piece. We landed an expansion. I was hoping for both. It takes the city and the museum for both.

LosAngelesBeauty

09-30-2006, 02:21 PM

'This is our Mona Lisa'

http://i.cnn.net/money/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387512/neue.03.jpg

Ronald Lauder's acquisition of Klimt's 'Adele' was the most expensive known purchase of a single work of art. Can it propel his museum to greatness?

By Tyler Green, Fortune
September 28 2006: 8:13 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- At about midnight last July 5, the New York Police Department closed Manhattan's East 86th Street. Billionaire Ronald S. Lauder walked back and forth in the street, waiting. Employees of his boutique museum for German and Austrian modern art, the Neue Galerie, waited too.

They were expecting a specially appointed 18-wheeler, arriving from Los Angeles after a three-day, three-night trip. Operational details were precise: The rig stopped only for fuel, and it regularly radioed its location. Just before midnight it called from New Jersey, then from the George Washington Bridge, and then from Harlem.

The military-like operation was designed to protect the rig's cargo, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" by turn-of-the-century Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. Lauder had just purchased it for the Neue Galerie, a museum he co-founded with his late friend Serge Sabarsky. The painting reportedly cost Lauder $135 million, probably the greatest sum ever spent for a work of art.

When the truck arrived, Lauder took a deep breath. "I realized that the picture was here," he says in the café of his museum. "This is our 'Mona Lisa.'" The painting's crate was unbolted from the sides of the truck and whisked upstairs, and "Adele" was installed behind bulletproof glass.

Lauder is right to be proud. "Adele" is a first-rate work of art, one of the most famous portraits of the 20th century. It shows one of fin-de-siècle Austria's wealthiest women, the wife of banker and sugar baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. She rests against a dazzling haze of gold, wearing a silver choker and dressed in a golden gown ornamented with byzantine motifs and swirling designs.

The painting would attract plenty of attention just for all that precious metal, but there's more. Klimt's rendering of Adele's full red lips and distant, heavy-lidded, sexed-up look have generated 100 years' worth of whispers. "Klimt started this painting in 1903 and finished in 1907," says Renee Price, the Neue Galerie's director. "What were they doing? It makes it kind of ..." Price looks at the floor, then back at me. "It makes it kind of spicy."

The Klimt purchase was coup
Lauder and the Neue Galerie hope so. For Lauder, the purchase of "Adele" marks the apex and nexus of his business, philanthropic, and public careers: His wealth, an estimated $2 billion, comes mostly from his stake in cosmetics giant Estée Lauder (Charts), of which he was once chairman (his brother, Leonard, holds that title now, having served for many years as CEO).

His philanthropic background includes not just founding the Neue Galerie but also a decade as chairman of New York City's Museum of Modern Art, and decades of leadership in charities that focus on Jewish life and post-Nazi restitution issues. Twenty years ago he represented the U.S. as its ambassador to Austria. (And as the closing of 86th Street demonstrated, Lauder is well connected in New York politics: In 1989 he ran for mayor of New York City, and he remains a prominent Republican donor.) With the purchase of "Adele," Lauder's lives came together. And he knew it.

"I want to be buried right here," he says, gesturing to the fireplace in the café of his museum.

The "Adele" purchase is more than a coup for Lauder. It is hands down the biggest American museum purchase of the past 100 years, on a par with the Metropolitan Museum's $5.5 million purchase of a Diego Velázquez portrait in 1971 (that would be $26 million today) or Henry E. Huntington's $729,000 purchase of Thomas Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy" for his Huntington Library in 1921 ($6.7 million today).

With "Adele," Lauder and the Neue Galerie are making a grand gamble: Can a splashy, nearly unimaginable art acquisition turn an obscure museum into a must-see destination? Can a single painting - even a $135 million one - lift a museum to prominence?

Throughout the late summer, other museums - and especially their wealthy donors - have been considering this same question. Four other Klimts from the Bloch-Bauer family collection are on the market and are expected to sell for a total of $100 million to $150 million. With those sales likely to come in the next month or two, the art world is buzzing about how Lauder scored his masterpiece, a story told here for the first time.

In recent years museums have pursued a different strategy for raising their profiles: Hiring star architects and asking them for splashily distinctive new buildings. While many donors and trustees are motivated by a passion for art, in many cities art museums are the most desirable charitable boards on which to sit. When museums choose to build, their trustees don't just want to serve art programs but to increase the prominence and profile of their city.

Business and art enthusiasts benefit from the relationship in many ways. When Minneapolis's Walker Art Center opened a $70 million expansion designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron last year, the museum and its new building earned the city unprecedented international press attention.

The Minneapolis business community anticipated it: Target (Charts), General Mills (Charts), Medtronic (Charts), U.S. Bancorp (Charts), Cargill, and Best Buy (Charts) (either directly or through their foundations) each gave more than $1 million, and the leaders of other Minnesota-based businesses, such as Coldwell Banker Burnet's Ralph Burnet, UnitedHealth Group CEO Bill McGuire, former Valspar CEO C. Angus Wurtele, and others, gave millions more.

"I think every CEO here would tell you that one of the reasons they support the cultural institutions in this community is that it helps them attract bright employees," Walker director Kathy Halbreich says. "The wind could sweep through here pretty fast if there weren't extensive facilities to harbor people, to let them enjoy those months that we can't enjoy the outdoors."

And a high-profile new cultural facility can market a city to outsiders more effectively than just about anything else. "People are profoundly pleased when they're sitting in some café in Paris and someone overhears that they're from Minnesota and says to them, 'The only thing I know about Minnesota is the Walker Art Center,'" Halbreich says. "And that's happened."

One painting or one building would not have such an impact on New York City, but trustees at other museums will be paying attention to the impact the Klimt has on the Neue Galerie. In many ways it is a perfect test case.

Even Lauder describes the pre-"Adele" Neue Galerie as a "cult kind of thing." Only about 350 people visited the museum each day, one-fortieth the attendance of the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Neue Galerie isn't listed in the Michelin Green Guide to New York City, while the Met receives 13 pages. The Neue Galerie's Austrian restaurant, Café Sabarsky, is better known than the museum that surrounds it. ("Perfect period piece," Zagat says. "Interminable waits.")

So far, the Klimt bet is paying off. Since "Adele" has been on view, the Neue Galerie's attendance has nearly sextupled, to around 10,000 visitors a week. In each of the past three weeks the museum has set at least one single-day attendance record.

"If you have a relatively small collection and you acquire a big painting that has been in the public's attention recently for reasons in addition to its beauty and quality, it's likely to make a big difference," says the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Cuno. "Adele" is just such a painting. It is a great work of art, to be sure, but it is also one with a remarkable history - and not just because of all those years it took Klimt to paint it.

Lauder's fascination with "Adele" goes back to when he visited Austria as a teenager. On his first morning in Vienna he walked over to the Belvedere, the 18th-century palace that houses the Austrian Gallery.

"When it opened, I was the first one in," Lauder says. "I'd seen 'Adele' in pictures and I'd read about it before, but nothing prepared me for how it looked. It was the first thing that I really saw in Vienna. And it was something that symbolizes so many things to me. It was just me, traveling without my parents. It symbolizes that moment of my growing up." It was the first of 40 years of encounters Lauder would have with "Adele."

When the painting was completed 100 years ago, Vienna, along with Paris, was the cultural capital of the world. As was the custom among the Viennese elite, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer wanted to celebrate his (much younger) bride, Adele, by commissioning a portrait.

Ferdinand hired an artist who had spent the past decade setting Vienna abuzz with his sexually outré takes on classical themes: Gustav Klimt. There were details about Adele Bloch-Bauer and the artist that Ferdinand may not have known: His wife had almost certainly modeled for Klimt since at least 1899, and the two had probably been carrying on an affair. Adele sat for hundreds of drawings in the years before Klimt finished his portrait in 1907.

Nazi expropriation
If Ferdinand knew, apparently he didn't mind: Adele's portrait immediately became the most prized object in his art collection. Sadly, Adele died in 1925. Then, in 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. Ferdinand, one of Austria's most prominent Jews, fled to Switzerland, leaving behind palatial estates and his art collection.

Nearly all of it was stolen by the Nazis, whose Moravian and Bohemian governor, Reinhard Heydrich, even took Ferdinand's grandest home outside Prague for a residence. (Heydrich, one of the key planners of the Holocaust, also gave some of Ferdinand's art collection to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. The SS stole the family's jewels and gave them to Hermann Göring.) The portrait of Adele ended up at the Austrian Gallery, which still "owned" it when Ferdinand died in 1945.

Ferdinand's will specified that the paintings, presuming they were recovered from the Nazis or the Austrian state, go to his and Adele's niece Maria Altmann and two of her siblings. But during the decade after the war, Austria found reasons to deny the heirs' claims on six Klimt paintings and on Ferdinand's other property. (The Austrian state railway office, for example, was housed in one of Ferdinand's palaces until just a few months ago, when his heirs recovered the building. During the war it was the depot from which the Germans sent Austria's Jews to death camps.)

Austria's strangest reason for not returning "Adele" and five other paintings was this: It claimed that Adele herself wanted the paintings to be given to Austria upon Ferdinand's death.

In the late 1990s, however, when Austria began to open Nazi-era records to scholars and other interested parties, a journalist named Hubertus Czernin learned otherwise. He was among the first to gain access to the Bloch-Bauer records, and he found that neither Ferdinand nor Adele had specified that any Klimts go to the Austrian state.

More shocking: The "donation" record that consigned "Adele" to the Austrian Gallery was dated 1941 and was signed "Heil Hitler."

Altmann, who during the war had fled to Los Angeles along with her husband, Fritz (whom the Nazis briefly imprisoned at Dachau before allowing him to be ransomed), saw that the family had a chance to reclaim the paintings.

Earlier this year nearly a decade of legal maneuvering paid off, and Austria returned five of the six paintings. The family decided to sell them. Enter Ronald Lauder-again. The collector had enjoyed a brief encounter with "Adele" in 1986, when he was ambassador to Austria and helped arrange a loan of the painting to the Museum of Modern Art. Now he saw the opportunity to buy it. "It wasn't until the paintings left Austria that I believed I might have a chance," Lauder says.

He called MoMA director Glenn Lowry and asked him if he thought Lauder should buy it - not for MoMA, but for the Neue Galerie. Lowry flew to Los Angeles, saw "Adele," and reported back, yes.

It was a shrewd move: Intentionally or not, it eliminated a potential competitor by making it clear that Lauder, MoMA's biggest art donor, wanted this one for the Neue Galerie. "It clearly was a picture destined to be at the Neue Galerie," Lowry says.

Lauder called Steve Thomas, an attorney at Irell & Manella, whom the Bloch-Bauer heirs had retained to handle the sale of the Klimts. In early April, shortly after the Klimts went on temporary exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lauder flew to L.A. for a 7 A.M. breakfast with Thomas.

The art of the deal
Lauder got right to the point: "If it's ever possible, I would like to consider getting 'Adele Bloch-Bauer' for the Neue Galerie," he told the attorney. Thomas said that the heirs might be interested. Lauder made an offer. "The price," Thomas recalls with a distinct pause, "was not close." Lauder asked him to express his interest directly to the heirs, Thomas agreed, and Lauder returned to New York.

Lauder wasn't the only interested party. Eli Broad, a billionaire philanthropist, an art collector, and the founder of both SunAmerica and KB Home, was spearheading a bid by the Los Angeles County Museum for all five Klimts. He organized LACMA donors to make a $150 million bid for the paintings. As word of the bid traveled through the museum world, people were shocked; $150 million would have been the largest sum an American museum had ever paid for art. Still, the heirs said no.

"It became clear that they were looking to get the greatest number of dollars they could," Broad says, adding that LACMA had hoped that the family would combine a sale with a partial gift - a recognition of LACMA's help in getting the paintings from Austria to Los Angeles, for insuring them, and the like.

Broad's team was unwilling to go higher because the Klimts weren't LACMA's only big project: In 2005 the museum kicked off what will be at least a $182 million, Renzo Piano-designed expansion. The building project had priority.

A couple of weeks after Lauder visited California, he called Thomas for an update. The attorney told him that the heirs had authorized him to have "more serious" talks. Ecstatic, Lauder suggested that Thomas fly to New York. "I have business in New York anyway," Thomas replied - as if finalizing the biggest art deal in memory wasn't the most important thing on his desk.

The two men had dinner at an Austrian restaurant. Thomas was blunt: "I told Ron that if he wanted to control the painting, the terms would have to be more serious."

He laid out the heirs' conditions. The family was intent on selling "Adele" to a museum, not to a private individual. The painting would have to be put on permanent display. The family would have to approve certain details of the display. "Adele" could never be deaccessioned. The painting's complicated history would have to be publicly acknowledged by the museum. The purchase price could not be made public. On and on.

Finally, Thomas said that the museum to which "Adele" was sold would have to have a secure, long-term future. (Lauder says that never came up, but Thomas mentioned it to me in two separate conversations.)

That condition had the potential to be thorny. The Neue Galerie is a mere toddler; its fifth birthday isn't until November. No question, the Lauder family had lavished money on the museum. Between Ronald and his mother, Estée (who died in 2004), the Lauders had given $85 million to the Neue Galerie between its founding in 1999 and the end of 2005. Ronald Lauder has also been unusually aggressive in building its collection through purchases of top-notch German and Austrian modern art.

For example, in May 2001, Lauder purchased one of the last Max Beckmann self-portraits in private hands. The $22.6 million he paid (the figure includes the auction house fee) was far beyond the auction house's $7 million to $10 million estimate, and it was a record for any German painting sold at auction.

But despite such high-profile purchases, the art world still whispered about the Neue Galerie's future for a simple reason: The museum had no major financial donors whose last name wasn't Lauder. The art world thought that Ronald Lauder might get tired of bankrolling his own museum. Several museum directors I talked to for this story asked me if I thought that Lauder would "still" fold Neue Galerie into the Museum of Modern Art.

"Neue Galerie will be very well endowed," Lauder says. "All the steps are being taken to make sure that the endowment is enough for 200 years. And that's about all you can do."

So while the art world buzzed about the Neue Galerie's future, both sides say it quickly became a nonissue for the heirs. Lauder asked Thomas if he could mull over the terms to see if he could make it work. Thomas said that would be fine. A few days later Lauder phoned Thomas and made the deal. Lauder's bet on his museum's future was in place. Now the question was: What impact would "Adele" have on his museum?

Not every expensive painting becomes an attraction. In 2004 the Metropolitan reportedly paid nearly $50 million for a nine- by six-inch painting by early Renaissance master Duccio di Buoninsegna. The painting is more important art historically than it is eye-pleasing, and the gallery in which the painting was installed is usually empty. Perhaps for that reason, in museum circles people still buzz about the Duccio's price more than about the work itself. (Met director Philippe de Montebello knows it - he phoned Renee Price just after the "Adele" purchase and said, "Thanks for making my Duccio look so reasonable.")

And that's why trustees and donors have preferred buildings: immediate gratification, publicity, and civic reward. In Minneapolis the Walker's expansion paid off with 1,100 news stories.

An acquisition doesn't usually have that kind of quick influence, but over time the impact can be greater. "If I had total druthers and could buy a painting for a painting vs. spending it on a building, I might be tempted to say that painting is going to last forever and will always be a draw," says Harry Parker, the recently retired director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

An example of the long-term benefit of an iconic artwork such as "Adele" can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago, home to three of the most famous paintings in America: Georges Seurat's composition of colorful dots, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (acquired in 1926); Grant Wood's portrait of farmer, wife, and pitchfork titled "American Gothic" (in 1930); and Edward Hopper's fluorescent-lit diner, "Nighthawks" (in 1942).

Generations of Chicagoans have grown up with the three paintings and consider Chicago's stewardship of them a point of civic pride. And because each image is in the public domain - anyone from an ad firm to a television producer to a T-shirt designer can use the images without paying for them or needing contractual permission - the paintings automatically market themselves, the museum, and Chicago.

Lauder understands this - when he refers to "Adele" as the Neue Galerie's "Mona Lisa," he's not just referring to the quality of the work of art. The Neue Galerie already intends to make "Adele"-related items available in its design store. It plans a couple of publications that people will be able to buy in its store and perhaps elsewhere.

But beyond that, there's not much the Neue can do. "Adele" is in the public domain too. It is an unusual asset in that how it will impact the Neue Galerie in the long run is up to other people.

What the Chicago examples have in common is that they were acquired about 70 years ago, before America's great museums were good. In other words, the Art Institute acquired them at a point in its development that mimics where the Neue Galerie is now.

Now that Lauder has Adele, he's thinking about what's next. He may make a bid for one or more of the other four Klimts that the Bloch-Bauer heirs are selling. And he may just build a new museum-say, a Neue Galerie Vienna.

"I think that would be a lot of fun," he says, trailing off. "But at this point we have our hands full here."

Substance amid the spotlights at the Clinton Global Initiative.

From the October 2, 2006 issue

Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387512/?postversion=2006092808

citywatch

10-02-2006, 06:55 PM

NY Times, October 1, 2006

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Navigating the aesthetic sprawl is easier than it looks. 1. Jason Rhoades’s ‘‘Black Pussy’’ was both an art installation and a great place to hang out and have a drink. 2. Peres Projects, a must-stop gallery in Chinatown. 3. Francesco Vezzoli installation at Gagosian Beverly Hills. 4. Nancy Rubins at her Topanga Canyon studio in front of raw material for her piece ‘‘Big Pleasure Point,’’ recently at Lincoln Center. 5. Mark Grotjahn outside his studio in Hollywood and a painting in progress, 6., for his current solo show at the Whitney Museum. 7. Raymond Pettibon exhibiton at Regen Projects. 9. Aaron Turner, a student in the U.C.L.A. M.F.A. program, in his studio. 10. Installation in progress at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. 11. Ryan Trecartin at QED Gallery in Culver City. 12. Work in progress at Jorge Pardo’s design studio. 13. The artist Doug Aitken in his Venice studio. His first large-scale public work goes up at the Modern in January 2007.

Style
Artquake

By BRUCE HAINLEY
Photographs by ARI MARCOPOULOS

I am amused by fancy art-world types who breeze into Los Angeles planning to “get” the scene in a few days. They would have better luck reading “In Search of Lost Time” over a long weekend. America’s second-largest city sprawls — physically, aesthetically, socially — over nearly 500 square miles, so any attempt to nutshell the burg and its cultural bazaar takes on comic aspects. Note that the Pompidou Center’s recent survey of Los Angeles art was called “The Birth of an Artistic Capital” and that Michael Govan, the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has declared Los Angeles the new New York, forgetting perhaps that Angelenos have never wished to be New Yorkers and that long before the 1955 birth date pronounced by the Pompidou, Hollywood was producing things as provocative, philosophical and influential as anything given the name of, well, art.

Sun, sand, great surf, a climate usually allowing a smooth shift from beachwear to cashmere pullover and until recently — “recently” thanks to no major earthquake in more than a decade and brutalized New Yorkers’ finding respite here — relatively cheap studio and living spaces, all with easy access to the materials of the film, television and porn industries, explain why anyone, not just artists, would wish to live and work here.

“In the 50’s there was no art scene in L.A. at all,” Tom Marioni wrote some 30 years ago in his artist-driven publication Vision. Marioni, that great conceptual troublemaker, encouraged aesthetics to mellow, so that we can all now claim that “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” (as his 1970 “social sculpture” was titled). By his estimation, “not until about ’64 or ’65 did L.A. become known as an art center.” He also thought that the L.A. scene “burned fast and extinguished itself in 10 years,” but perhaps a few too many brews combined with the weather in his hometown of San Francisco had fogged his perspective.

You would have to ignore that by 1964 Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery had already put on landmark shows (including Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans”) and that by 1975 Cal Arts was on fire: the institute could already claim as alums Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Barbara Bloom, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein and David Salle. But they all quickly decamped to New York — never mind that Robert Irwin, an L.A. native, and Ed Ruscha, a transplant from Oklahoma, had thrived out West long before their alma mater existed in Valencia.

It was some combination of John Baldessari moving to L.A. to teach many of those first Cal Arts grads and, soon after, the Cal Arts graduate Mike Kelley not moving to New York, that significantly changed the situation. Although such a synopsis jettisons all nuance, in L.A. it is not a confluence of museums, auction houses and galleries but the intense nexus of art schools (there are five major players, all vying to win the tartest students) and their renowned faculties (including, to cherry-pick one from each school, Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, Thomas Lawson, Frances Stark and Larry Johnson) that remain key to challenging what art will be.

Often, an early sign of artistic success in New York is when the artist no longer has to teach to pay the rent; for over 30 years, major artists in L.A. have continued to teach in addition to carrying on stellar careers. Contrary to the air-headed local stereotype, it’s as if to be an artist worth the name means educating younger practitioners how to think critically about what is seen, an education the world, and image-obese America especially, too frequently has abandoned, since images are understood to be, I guess, transparent. (Dude, no way!) Combine this pedagogic tradition with the fact that one of the sharpest art journals anywhere, Afterall, is co-published here, and L.A. can shrug its shoulders.

Of course, no one wishes to be enrolled forever. It would be jejune to think that schools could, or should, provide more than the equivalent of a pair of Ray-Bans to guard against the UV rays of a solar art market. Carefree without major auction action and no distracting art fair (or, at least, not yet), L.A.’s galleries thrive as a system in which smarts and fun are on almost equal footing with business.

The reigning gallery style is brisk and low-key chic compared with Chelsea’s grand, mausoleumlike airs, and its gallerists, with lower overhead, take relatively more risks, mixing things up with bright group shows by nongallery artists. New venues have been springing up like some genetically altered mushroom able to thrive in full sunshine.

The already decentralized metropolis can now boast of galleries in neighborhoods from Culver City (the current center of buzz, if not always daring cerebration) to Chinatown and Santa Monica. Any thinking person would have to count David Kordansky’s and Daniel Hug’s galleries as well as Solo Projects and Sister, helmed, respectively, by Tom Solomon and Katie Brennan, as serious players. There is also Trudi, a brazen, vitrinelike alternative to the Wrong Gallery; the innovative nonprofit Outpost for Contemporary Art; and the inaugural sessions of the Sundown Schoolhouse, spearheaded by the indefatigable architect and catalyst, Fritz Haeg.

And, hey, the artist-impresarios Flora Wiegmann, Drew Heitzler and Justin Beal’s new bar, the Mandrake, gives needed juice to the Culver City drag, a place not only to spotlight what’s really on the local minds (the artist-curator Darren Bader’s bicoastal shindig, “Grupe,” started things off with a bang) or to test with friends the highest forms but also to sit in the corner, sloe-eyed, researching the timely goings-on.

L.A. has been nominated as an art capital before, and it will be again when the spotlight moves elsewhere. (Mexico City? Shanghai?) Gagosian Beverly Hills’s Oscar-week opening remains the only heady swirl of art and industry in Tinseltown. Art making goes on despite it all, behind closed doors, which is why it matters. Party of one — or plus one.

Bruce Hainley is associate director of graduate studies in criticism and theory at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He is the author most recently of “Foul Mouth,” published by 2nd Cannons Publications.

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Choose your vehicle of expression. 1. Wendy Yao commissions artists to make limited-edition things like T-shirts for her tiny Chinatown store, Ooga Booga. 2. Ruben Ochoa transformed his father’s van into a groovy mobile gallery, including an exhibition space, an office (in the front seat) and a janitor’s closet (in the back). 3. The artist and designer Jorge Pardo in the industrial work space where much of his furniture is produced. He recently designed a house in Naguabo, Puerto Rico, for a couple who collect his work. 4. The performance troupe My Barbarian in rehearsal at Redcat, an art space located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex designed by Frank Gehry. 5. The pioneering L.A. artist Chris Burden at his studio in Topanga Canyon. (He is the husband of the artist Nancy Rubins.) For the past few years, Burden has been collecting and restoring vintage street lamps, 14 of which were installed at South London Gallery last month.

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Who wouldn’t want to live and work here? 1. Robert Therrien’s cavernous studio is large enough to accommodate production of sculptures like this supersize card table and folding chairs. 2. Dave Muller is increasingly known for his ‘‘Top 10’’ paintings of record-album spines — not to mention his vast music collection. 3. The Milan-based gallerist Emi Fontana commissions installations in some of the best locations the city has to offer by artists like Olafur Eliasson and, more recently, Monica Bonvicini for her continuing project, West of Rome. 4. Jason Meadows and his sculptural installation at Marc Foxx Gallery on Wilshire Blvd. 5. U.C.L.A.’s is one of several competing Los Angeles art schools that release some 100 aspiring artists into the world each year, including Spencer Lewis, 6. The school has a warren of student studio spaces, 7., in Culver City. 8. An opening for the artist Emilie Halpern at Anna Helwing on Culver City’s gallery strip. 9. The artist and writer Frances Stark in her studio, located in an outdoor mall in Chinatown.

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From old guard to arriviste. 1. Mike Kelley is considered one of the quintessential Los Angeles artists. Over the years he has banded up with the likes of Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy and Dave Muller, to name a few. His Highland Park compound, 3., includes a music studio. 2. Like many Los Angeles artists, Pae White has found studio space in the unlikeliest of places. 4. A typical Saturdaynight opening at Blum & Poe in Culver City, where the party spills over into the parking lot. 5. Mark Grotjahn, in situ. 6. The Redcat curator Eungie Joo overseeing a sound installation by the French artist Mathieu Briand. 7. A peek inside the home of Beth Swofford, an agent at C.A.A., whose expansive private collection includes work by contemporary artists like Richard Prince and Luc Tuymans. 8. Justin Beal, along with Drew Heitzler and Flora Wiegmann, both formerly of Champion Fine Art and Williamsburg, recently opened the Mandrake, a bar and exhibition space conveniently located in the heart of the Culver City gallery scene. 9. For 40 years, Gemini G.E.L. has produced limited-edition prints for artists like Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg.

ocman

10-03-2006, 04:48 AM

ike something out of a Jane Austen novel, California's attorney general on Monday named a chaperon to accompany the J. Paul Getty Trust for two fiscal years. The Getty, headstrong and wayward, apparently requires some adult supervision.

Fourteen months after launching a civil investigation, the attorney general issued his findings on the shenanigans that disrupted the Getty Trust with escalating intensity since the elaborate Brentwood campus opened more than eight years ago. The 13-page report can be frustrating to read, since it necessarily hews close to the legal issues of the investigation. Those legalities commonly concern finances, not program goals or institutional ethics.

Essentially, the report's two conclusions confirm what we already knew.

First, former Getty Trust President Barry Munitz repeatedly engaged in self-dealing — the improper use of tax-exempt charitable funds for personal benefit. Second, the Getty's board of trustees repeatedly failed to exercise adequate oversight of the $5.5-billion institution, the nation's largest art philanthropy. Munitz resigned last February and made financial restitution; board Chairman John Biggs left in August.

The 13-page document says no crimes were committed and, with both men gone, no legal action will be taken. But the chaperon will be watching, taking notes and reporting back at regular intervals to the putative parents back in Sacramento. The state has never before had to assign a monitor to a California charity, which at the very least ought to chasten the committee of Getty trustees now engaged in a search for a new president and chief executive.

Beyond the blot on institutional reputation, the bigger tragedy is that eight years have been squandered.

Yes, the Getty Trust's four operating programs have continued on, often to superlative effect. The museum, research library, conservation institute and grant foundation are staffed by some of the best professionals in the field, and they can rightly claim their share of distinctive achievements.

But they operate under the umbrella of the trust — and the trust itself ought to perform an innovative artistic leadership role for Los Angeles and the world. You would be hard-pressed to name many major art initiatives to have emanated from its gleaming Brentwood offices. The trust has mostly been missing in action.

With art, opportunities missed can be opportunities forever lost. A gut-wrenching example unfolded over the last six months, when a rudderless Getty engulfed in turmoil stayed out of the contest to acquire five early Modern paintings by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. Among the works is a paramount masterpiece of 20th century art.

To acquire the sought-after group, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art put $150 million on the table — a huge sum, surely without precedent in the history of American art museums, but not enough to secure so large and coveted a prize. Had the Getty Trust taken note and stepped forward to add to the pot — something around half of LACMA's ante might well have done the trick — there is good reason to believe the incomparable Klimt ensemble would have stayed in L.A. But the world's richest art institution stayed mum and the paintings left town.

The report absolves the trust from error in selling a land parcel whose market value was in dispute. But it says nothing about the transaction's conflict of interest, in which Munitz improperly steered the deal toward a friend and business associate, Eli Broad, while instructing staff to cover up the fact.

The report absolves the trust for having paid a surprising $3-million severance to former Getty Museum Director Deborah Gribbon, whose sudden resignation in October 2004 broke open the scandal's floodgates. Gribbon is revealed to have had a claim against the trust for unlawful "constructive discharge" — typically, harassment to the point where an employee feels reasonably compelled to resign — and the damages could have exceeded the severance. But the claim's grim details are not explained.

The report absolves the trust of guilt in spending millions of dollars to fund a movie on elementary school teachers, redecorate a new office for a former employee, publicize a White House education initiative about Mars and send an employee to a chess tournament in Israel. The expenditures were legal because they were made to other charities. Understandably, the attorney general makes no comment about those gifts' obvious irrelevance to the trust's own mission statement, which "focuses on the visual arts" so that "cultural enlightenment and community involvement in the arts can help lead to a more civil society." Mars is not mentioned.

With trustees' support, Munitz doubled the size of the Getty's grant-making foundation, even as he cut the museum's art acquisition funds and began corporate fundraising for programs. (Deborah Marrow, who runs the enlarged grant program, is now the trust's acting president.) When you've got big money to give away, you've got endless reasons — or excuses — for lavish globetrotting, while the multitudes hoping for a share of your largess have just as many reasons to blow sunshine your way. These crude blandishments, needless to say, are beyond the scope of an attorney general's purview — and perhaps even a chaperon's practiced eye.

Yet they do go to the heart of the Getty Trust's dysfunction. The trust has taken important steps to reform its governance policies and practices, including new provisions on conflicts of interest and whistle-blowing now posted at its website (www.getty.edu). So far, though, it has declined to issue a report of findings in its own internal investigation, claiming that strict confidentiality precludes it.

That's a big mistake. Legalisms are only part of the terrible story, and the attorney general has now addressed them. As for the Getty Trust, if the federal government can publish the National Intelligence Estimate in a form that does not compromise national security, surely the trust can issue a sober, introspective report that does not betray confidences. For advice on propriety, it could ask the chaperon.

citywatch

10-03-2006, 09:45 AM

Munitz doubled the size of the Getty's grant-making foundation, even as he cut the museum's art acquisition funds
That guy sure was a piece of crap. It would be nice & fitting if he were booted out of LA, forever.

LosAngelesBeauty

10-07-2006, 03:42 AM

Huntington Library Receives an Electrifying Donation

In an electrifying gift, Edison turns over its massive photographic archive of the region's transformation to the Huntington Library.

By Larry Gordon
Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2006

Photographers for pioneering electric companies documented a sweeping visual history of Southern California, from its 19th century farm days to the suburban sprawl after World War II.

When giant hydroelectric dams were built on formerly wild rivers, they shot. When cocktail lounges added air conditioning in formerly sweltering digs, they shot. When floods and earthquakes ravaged the region, they shot.

The result was an enormous collection for what eventually became the Southern California Edison firm: 40,000 photographic prints, 35,000 negatives and 450 reels of motion picture film. And on Thursday, officials announced that the parent company, Edison International, has donated that archive to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, where it will be digitized and made available for historians and researchers.

Jennifer Watts, the library's curator of photographs, described the gift as extremely important to chronicling "the evolution of Southern California."

Although many photos show early generators and transmission lines, they also offer interesting and usually unintended insights into economic and cultural life. In the fashions and streetscapes from the 1880s to the 1950s, "you see a lost era," she said.

For example, a picture of a 1934 fatal car crash into a utility pole in Compton shows the surrounding neighborhood as quietly rural. In promotional scenes from a 1917 cooking school class in Pomona, women in fancy hats watch demonstrations of early electric appliances. Long-vanished poultry farms in Pomona and Fontana are depicted in the 1930s with what were then new-fangled electric chick warmers and egg coolers.

A photo of a sign, thought to be from the 1890s, illustrates how unfamiliar most people were with electric lights. "Do Not Attempt to Light With a Match," it warned, urging people to use the turnkey instead. "The Use of Electricity for Lighting Is No Way Harmful to Health, Nor Does It Affect the Soundness of Sleep."

One of the most engaging images displays a group of nattily dressed young men atop bicycles on 4th Street in downtown Los Angeles in 1912. In the days before lightbulbs could be easily screwed in, their job was to deliver and install free replacement bulbs to homes and businesses.

Edison had stored the collection in various locations over the years but recently became more concerned about proper preservation of delicate items. Discussions began with the Huntington, which has a well-respected curatorial staff, as well as chilled and low-humidity storage vaults.

"We are delighted to be able to give these to the Huntington, to have their professional skills and to make it available to researchers and scholars," said John Bryson, chairman and chief executive of the Rosemead-based Edison International. Bryson noted that the library has other large archives about California history. "It's a natural fit," he said.

Plus, Bryson said that parts of the collection and Edison's history are directly linked to Henry Huntington, the library's founder. Huntington was the backer of the vastly ambitious Big Creek hydroelectric plant, which came online in the Sierra in 1913 to help power his Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles. Through subsequent mergers, Edison took over Big Creek and expanded it.

Appraisers have estimated that the collection would sell for about $800,000, not including its future intellectual worth and reproduction rights, according to Edison officials. In addition, the utility is giving about $200,000 for preservation and digitizing. That will take up to two years.

The photos are housed on shelves at the Huntington, in cardboard boxes cataloged by such subjects as steam plants, accidents and sports. Ross Landry, a retired Edison curator who is under contract to help with the project, is painstakingly comparing the prints and negatives for overlaps. He said it is difficult sometimes not to get lost in a past Southern California that was, for example, well served by a network of electric trolleys.

Greg Hise, associate professor of urban history at USC's School of Policy, Planning and Development, has seen some of the collection and predicted that it will be invaluable for him and other researchers.

For example, he said he was drawn to 1916 pictures of power poles in downtown Los Angeles and what they captured of nearby rail yards, workers and housing.

"As is often the case, you think you are collecting one thing and it turns out to be useful in ways you never imagined," he said of the Edison photographers.

The photos of early 20th century utility workers dangling off cliffs and over rivers will remind people of how much fortitude and courage it took to build the region's first dams and power grids, he added. "Today, we flip on a switch and expect the lights to come on, our computers to work," Hise said. "We forget what lies behind that."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
larry.gordon@latimes.com

LosAngelesBeauty

10-14-2006, 01:29 PM

Broad Buys Koons Egg for $3.5 Million as London Sales Start

By Linda Sandler

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Eli Broad bought Jeff Koons's sculpture, ``Cracked Egg (Blue),'' for about $3.5 million from Gagosian's new West End gallery, starting a week of art sales in London.

Broad, whose California art foundation owns about 1,300 contemporary works, began his Koons collection in the 1980s, and has expanded it ever since. He spoke to Bloomberg at Brown's Hotel before taking a cab to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park, which opens to VIPs today for private views.

``Unfortunately, we're paying more for Koons than we did in the 1980s,'' said Broad, 73, a slight, gray-haired man in a suit. ``But if you're a collector, you buy a work when you find it. We don't pause when prices rise. The only thing that happens is our insurance bills go up.''

Broad, among the largest contemporary collectors, helped found Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, is financing a new modern-art wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is underwriting a new production of Wagner's ``Ring'' cycle at Los Angeles Opera.

Art prices aren't likely to keep rising, after tripling in 10 years, he said.

``I don't think the market can keep going up,'' he said. ``In the U.S., we see real estate not going up -- houses are selling at lower prices. You can't have anything going up 10 percent to 20 percent to 30 percent indefinitely.''

U.S. artist Koons, along with Cindy Sherman and the U.K.'s Damien Hirst, are among the great artists who emerged in the 1990s, he said.

Museum Storage

Asked whether his collection would wind up in a museum, Broad said it would be divided and doled out to institutions that needed the specific works. The risk of donating an entire collection to a single museum was that much of it might wind up in storage, he said.

``Where it goes will depend on who needs what. We don't want them in storage.'' Giving a clue as to possible beneficiaries, Broad reeled off a number of boards he sits on, including MOCA. LACMA would be loaned more than 100 works, he said.

Koons would be an exception to the breakup of the art holdings, he said: ``We would like to keep Koons together. We have his basketballs, his bunny and one of his `Celebration' works.'' The cracked egg, in blue stainless steel, with the severed top beside the larger piece, is one of five, he said. ``There's one left. It will cost more when it's sold,'' he said.

Broad, a founder and former chief executive officer of the homebuilder KB Home and insurer SunAmerica Inc., paid $11.8 million in May for a 1962 Andy Warhol painting of a Campbell's soup can and $23.8 million last November for a David Smith ``Cubi'' sculpture, the highest price ever paid for a contemporary artwork sold at auction.

Leaving London

He'll depart London on Thursday, perhaps leaving some bids at the auction houses, he said, declining to name works he might buy. His trip to Frieze would enable him to see large numbers of works from international dealers in a short time, he said.

``We didn't come with the intention of buying anything specific there,'' he said.

Frieze, with sales last year of almost $57 million, is part of a week of museum and gallery shows of contemporary art, plus some $147 million of auctions. The fair is open to the public from tomorrow through Oct. 15.

To contact the reporter on this story: Linda Sandler in London at lsandler@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: October 11, 2006 08:18 EDT

LosAngelesBeauty

10-17-2006, 01:29 PM

LACMA gains three high-profile trustees

A philanthropist, author Michael Crichton and Yahoo's CEO will help upgrade the museum.

By Suzanne Muchnic
Times Staff Writer

October 17, 2006

With a new director at the helm and a major expansion underway, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has added three high-profile members to its board of trustees.

David Bohnett, a philanthropist and technology entrepreneur who heads the David Bohnett Foundation and the private equity firm Baroda Ventures; Michael Crichton, a bestselling author of such books as "Jurassic Park" and "State of Fear," a television producer and filmmaker; and Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive of Yahoo Inc. and former chairman of Warner Bros., have been elected to a 44-member board, 21 of whom have joined since 2000.

"We grow the collection, we grow the building, we grow the board," said LACMA Director Michael Govan, who took charge of the museum in April. The new trustees are well qualified to help the museum improve its facilities, develop its program and extend its reach into the community, he said.

Among those qualifications is experience on other organizations' boards. Bohnett is on the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. Crichton has served on the boards of Harvard University, the International Design Conference at Aspen and the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla. Semel is a trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Beverly Hills and Emerson College in Boston.

Bohnett, Crichton and Semel have arrived at LACMA during the first phase of an ambitious project to expand, upgrade and unify the museum's facilities in a comprehensive program designed by architect Renzo Piano. A new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, funded by trustee Eli Broad, is under construction. Plans call for renovation of the five existing buildings, including the former May Co. department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.

*

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com

bobcat

10-24-2006, 07:13 AM

THE HUNTINGTON RECEIVES $2 MILLION GRANT FROM
IRVINE FOUNDATION FOR CHINESE GARDEN
Other substantial recent gifts bring the total raised thus far to $15.5 million

SAN MARINO, Calif.– The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens has just
been awarded a $2 million grant by the James Irvine Foundation to help support construction
costs of the institution’s Chinese Garden 漢庭頓中國園. The grant, announced by Irvine today,
puts the total amount in gifts and pledges raised to date at about $15.5 million. The cost for the
first phase is projected to be $18.3 million.
“This generous gift from the Irvine Foundation puts us significantly closer to completing the
funding for the Garden’s first phase,” says Huntington President Steven Koblik. “We’ve had
tremendous momentum in our fundraising efforts; this grant will certainly help us to inspire new
and additional gifts. We are extremely grateful to Irvine for believing in the value of this
important project.”
The $2 million comes to The Huntington as a one to one
matching grant – that is, the Irvine
Foundation is challenging The Huntington to raise an additional $2 million in new and increased
gifts from other donors.
Immediately rising to meet the challenge were the children of Fung Chow 陳鳳儔 and Wai Hing
Chan 陳梁惠卿, who committed $150,000 as a living memorial for their parents just after the
Irvine grant was announced on Wednesday.
The matching grant builds on growing momentum that recently culminated in the first milliondollar
gift from a Chinese family the
Wang family: Vivine, Janice, Dorothy, and H. Roger
Wang 王恆和王徐貞賢夫婦及女兒王宣懿、王宣琳. “The Huntington's Chinese Garden is truly a
unique endeavor and our family is lucky enough to witness its development from its inception,”
says Janice Wang. “Given the truly international scale of the project, any assistance we can
provide, regardless on which side of the Pacific, is our pleasure.”
Other substantial recent gifts have come from Lily Y. Wong 黃陳月如, Goodwin 吳繼偉 and
Yama Gaw 陳雅文, and MeiLee
Ney 李梅. Fundraising for the project has been extremely
successful, with an overwhelming response from the Chinese community—local, national, and
international. In total, The Huntington has received gifts from more than 200 Chinese donors,
including a variety of leaders, businesspeople, and philanthropists from the region’s growing
Chinese community. Many express delight and gratitude for the opportunity to support this
exceptional Garden dedicated to furthering knowledge and understanding about Chinese culture,

both through the Garden’s physical beauty and through an array of educational and public
programs.
“The response from the Chinese community has been phenomenal,” said Koblik. “This is a
unique project with respect to how it’s being funded and how it’s getting done. It’s a coming
together of community; we’re all working together here in San Marino, in Suzhou, and with the
help of donors everywhere. It’s an extremely powerful moment in the history of The
Huntington.”
The Huntington is constructing the first publicly accessible classical Chinese Garden in
California and one of the largest outside of China. The first phase consists of a 1.3acre
lake, five
bridges, and eight pavilions surrounded by a natural landscape. The ambitious project was
conceived some two decades ago, and work began in earnest in 2001 when The Huntington
received a $10 million gift from the estate of Huntington Overseer Peter Paanakker. Since that
time, it has generated interest and support from governmental and philanthropic leadership both
in China and locally, and has been covered extensively by the media.
The public currently has the opportunity to view the Chinese Garden during a preview period
that runs through February 2007. Viewing the Garden in this initial state will give visitors a
sense of what’s to come. Foundations are in place for the structures that will be built around the
lake in 2007: pavilions, covered walkways, a tea shop, teahouse, and “poetic views” in the
tradition of Suzhoustyle
scholar gardens. The Summer Garden section is expected to open in fall
2008.

LosAngelesBeauty

10-24-2006, 08:11 AM

200 ppl and only $15 million???

Damn, the Chinese are being stingy! I know they got some more money than that up their sleeves! C'mon you rich Chinese living in San Marino! You can do betta than that!

citywatch

10-24-2006, 08:34 AM

LACMA, Huntington lead in arts fundraising

The two institutions join KCET as the area's top charity recipients on the latest Philanthropy 400 list.

By Mike Boehm, Times Staff Writer

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino are the Southern California arts community's two entries on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual Philanthropy 400 listing of U.S. charities enjoying the greatest fundraising success.

Both museums were raising money for renovation or expansion campaigns during the 2005 fiscal year that generated the rankings. LACMA raised a total of $55.2 million and ranked 290th, the Huntington took in $46.3 million and ranked 335th. LACMA's ongoing campaign actually decelerated from 2004, with private donations slipping 30%, according to the Chronicle. The Huntington boosted its take 139%. Public television station KCET was ranked 264th, with $58.4 million in donations, a 2% drop from the previous year.

The Chronicle came up with its list by analyzing organizations' federal tax returns.

While charitable giving to the 400 top institutions rose 13%, to $62.7 billion, fueled in part by Hurricane Katrina relief, arts and cultural organizations on the list, including museums, libraries, performance groups and public broadcasting, were less favored than in 2004. Their take of $1.47 billion was off 10.6% from the previous year, the Chronicle calculates, and represented a 2.3% slice of the entire 400.

Other leading reapers of cultural largess include:

New York's Museum of Modern Art (No. 57, with $239 million),
Public Broadcasting Service (60, $232.5 million),
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (63, $210 million),
The Smithsonian Institution (91, $163.7 million),
Boston television station WGBH (130, $118 million),
New York TV station WNET (151, $102.2 million),
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (162, $96.4 million),
The Metropolitan Opera (165, $93.4 million),
The American Museum of Natural History (182, $84.4 million),
National Public Radio (206, $78 million),
The New York Public Library (231, $69.4 million),
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (239, $67.3 million),
Arlington, Va., TV station WETA (257, $60.4 million),
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (305, $51.1 million),
Lincoln Center (330, $47.1 million),
The Juilliard School (336, $46.2 million),
Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center (339, $45.9 million),
Carnegie Hall (345, $45.4 million),
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (358, $43.2 million),
San Francisco TV station KQED (374, $40.7 million),
Minnesota Public Radio (377, $40.4 million),
and San Francisco Opera (385, $39.5 million).

Of the 23 arts and cultural institutions on the 400 list (including the Juilliard School, an arts university that the Chronicle classifies as an educational institution, and excluding PBS and NPR, which are national in scope, and the 225th-ranked William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, which the Chronicle considers as a library), nine are in New York City, three each in L.A. and the Washington, D.C., area, and two each in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

LosAngelesBeauty

10-24-2006, 08:44 AM

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/2111/untitledxm3.png (http://imageshack.us)

LA is the wealthiest area of the USA and we aren't on par with NYC! It just means we don't have the culture yet to really have art in people's faces. Once LACMA is renovated/expanded with the Purple Line outside its front door, and Downtown LA is revitalized (another 5-10 years), I believe philanthropy will actually increase dramatically because people want to give money to institutions that are EASILY accessible to the public.

However, I am not sure why Houston's Museum of Fine Arts received so much money. I mean, it's not like Houston is known of the arts, so maybe there's some more to this.

bjornson

10-24-2006, 09:31 AM

NYC has more billionaires. They also have a society that basically competes for philanthropy. In L.A., new money comes every year and so philanthropy's a rather new concept here. No one's competing to see who can give the most money to what institute, museum, or foundation.

But just to enter a side here, L.A. does have the second most amount of billionaires, and yet, Eli Broad seems to be the only one giving whether he likes the art he's giving money to or not (he's not that fond of opera, but he donates to the L.A. Opera).

WonderlandPark

10-24-2006, 03:33 PM

I think it is the case with NY that many millionaires have their official residence in a lower tax state, that skews the ^^^ chart.

ocman

10-25-2006, 07:11 AM

USC just got a 35M donation from an alumnus for their engineering program. This is one example of this rash of donations for that school recently.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/15836211.htm

bjornson

10-26-2006, 11:33 PM

Skin and Bones Fever
Exhibit serves up chicette slew

Thursday, October 26, 2006

(LOS ANGELES) The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) will host an opening night fête on November 18 celebrating the debut of its highly anticipated exhibit, “Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.” The event, the most extensive fashion-related exhibition ever presented on the West Coast, will showcase 46 works from designers like Yohji Yamamoto, Dries Van Noten, Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Yoshiki Hishinuma, and architects such as Testa & Weiser, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Herzog & de Meuron, whose Prada Aoyama Epicenter store will be on display. The sit-down dinner at the museum’s Grand Avenue location will culminate with a performance by Rufus Wainwright and the MisShapes.

A healthy mix of fashion and Hollywood types are expected at the unveiling, including Michelle Hicks and Johnny Lee Miller, Debi Mazar (being dressed by Isabel Toledo, who will also attend), Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, Arianne Phillips (the night’s honorary committee chairperson), Narciso Rodriguez, Yeohlee Teng, Trina Turk, Kelly Wearstler, and Isaiah Washington. Yohji Yamamoto, although unconfirmed, may make the trek to L.A. as well.

The exhibition will be open to the public from November 19-March 5, 2007.

funhaus

10-27-2006, 09:41 AM

I've uploaded some photos from my visit to the Broad Art Center here http://www.flickr.com/photos/funhaus/sets/72157594346811951/

http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h61/11jp/broad.jpg

LosAngelesBeauty

10-30-2006, 07:19 AM

edluva

11-02-2006, 09:59 AM

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/2111/untitledxm3.png (http://imageshack.us)

It's amazing to think that at the very least, 262 billion dollars of wealth sits in the pockets of millionaires in LA County alone.

SunMonTueWedThuFriSa

11-02-2006, 07:20 PM

How is Maricopa County up there?

bjornson

11-07-2006, 04:00 PM

Finally L.A. has started up a Ballet.

Unfortunately, all of the locations that the company is debuting in are in the satellite cities.

LA's Men In Tights
One would think after the LA Opera debuted sucessfully back in the 1980s that a ballet company would have come prancing in en suite, but that wasn't the case. Now after years of waiting, the Los Angeles Ballet has finally formed, and will be holding its debut performance at the Wilshire Theatre on December 2. But before Nutcrackers start pirouetting, the company will be holding a fundraiser this Thursday at Bergamot Station. Hosted by Anjelica Huston, the event will feature an art auction with pieces from Orlando Bloom, Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, Dennis Hopper, Viggo Mortensen, Yoko Ono, Steve Martin and many more; food from Melisse, JiRaffe, La Terza and more; and a preview performance from the Los Angeles Ballet. Click here to purchase tickets for the event.

LosAngelesBeauty

12-02-2006, 12:17 AM

--This article hopefully foreshadows Broad bequeathing his most significant pieces to LACMA and possibly MOCA. LA, having the most impressive contemporary art collection, will by default put it in the top tier cities of art because even contemporary art will age and appreciate even more value. Give LA a few more years and it'll have a thriving downtown/urban core, a subway down Wilshire, fantastic museums, the best shopping in the world, the beach/mountains...LA will finally redeem itself. :cheers:

THE COLLECTORS

A peek at Eli Broad's L.A. cache

For the first time, the philanthropist fills his galleries with works by local artists for an exclusive show, drawn from his cloistered collection. Here's a glimpse.

By Suzanne Muchnic
Times Staff Writer

December 3, 2006

ELI BROAD'S got a secret.

The billionaire philanthropist and businessman may be the most public of America's private art collectors. He sits up front at auctions and makes no secret of his purchases. A major exhibition from his contemporary art collections, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, went on the road from 2001 to 2003. Hundreds of other Broad-owned works pop up every year at museums and university galleries across the country.

But what goes on at the Broad Art Foundation's headquarters in Santa Monica happens behind closed doors. The building, a renovated 1927 telephone switching station, is an anonymous fortress that all but disappears into the beachside landscape. Conceived as a "lending library," the foundation presents rotating exhibitions from its ever-expanding collection of about 1,400 pieces by 130 artists. But the galleries are open by appointment only to art professionals, scholars and small groups of university or museum affiliates.

Every year or so, the volume of visitors skyrockets for a special invitational affair, when a new installation goes up and the doors open to droves of curators, collectors, artists, dealers, critics, community leaders and friends of Broad and his wife, Edythe. The exclusivity of such events always makes them hot tickets. But interest is especially high this year because, for the first time, all the exhibition space is devoted to works by L.A.-based artists — an aspect of the collection that's less well known than Broad's extensive holdings of New York figures, such as sculptor Jeff Koons, photographer Cindy Sherman and painters Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

On a recent Sunday, about 800 people turn out to see the new show, beginning with a huge gallery of paintings and drawings by Ed Ruscha.

"We thought it was time," Broad says of the L.A. focus. His foundation began collecting works by Ruscha, painter Charles Garabedian, conceptualist John Baldessari, sculptor Robert Therrien and performance/installation artist Mike Kelley many years ago, subsequently adding pieces by other Los Angeles artists, including painters Amy Adler, Toba Khedoori and Mark Bradford and photographer Sharon Lockhart.

Walking through four floors of high-ceilinged galleries and an additional exhibition space in the basement, Broad points out familiar favorites, such as Therrien's "Under the Table," a vastly over-scaled table and chairs that fills an entire gallery and dwarfs people who walk under it.

He's also proud of spectacular recent acquisitions, including Chris Burden's "Bateau de Guerre," a huge battleship suspended from the ceiling on the third floor. Composed of gas cans, plastic toys, a miniature castle and blazing electric lamps, it's a scary/funny thought-provoker about war games. Doug Aitken's video installation, "New Skin," in a room of its own on the second floor, muses about the plight of a woman who collects images as she loses her eyesight.

Broad recalls buying two Ruscha paintings from the last Venice Biennale and another from the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. He grabbed a Khedoori painting in her studio, before it was shown at Regen Projects in West Hollywood. Keeping up with the scene, with the foundation's director, Joanne Heyler, is part of the fun.

Does he ever fall out of love with the art he buys? "The love lasts longer for some than for others," he says. But he's still crazy about Baldessari's 1985 "Buildings=Guns=People: Desire," a composition of greatly enlarged color photographs that measures about 15 1/2 feet high and 37 feet wide. And he believes that Lari Pittman's immense 1995 painting, "Like You," is a masterpiece.

"We collect these things because they are great artworks from a great city," says Broad, in the news lately for his joint offer to buy the Tribune Co., which owns The Times. "When we collect art from other places, we think about what we want to bring to Los Angeles." And that leads into his mantra.

"I think Los Angeles is going to be the contemporary art capital of the world," he says, ticking off the region's top art schools and other assets. "When the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opens at LACMA, Los Angeles will have more gallery space for contemporary art than any other city in the world." The Broad-funded, $60-million structure, designed by architect Renzo Piano, will be finished in about a year, he says. The opening date hasn't been set, but he says it's likely to happen in February 2008.

So which works from his collections will be lent to BCAM or given to the museum?

"Ask Michael Govan," Broad says, referring to the new director of LACMA. Though he is well known as a force who dominates every project he becomes involved with, Broad is leaving plans for the opening show to Govan, LACMA curators and Heyler. Broad notes that the museum already has purchased a signature map-like tapestry by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti through the $10-million acquisition fund he established.

"LACMA has more energy than ever. With Michael Govan, more has been done in seven months than in the last decade," he says. "With his energy and his comprehensive understanding of art and the art world, I'm sitting back and saying, 'How can I help?' "

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com

Westsidelife

12-02-2006, 12:29 AM

While we have world class cultural institutions such as the Getty Center, Griffith Observatory, Disney Concert Hall, etc. I really think we're lacking in art museums. Museums like The Louvre and The Metropolitan Museum of Art! We need Guggenheim! Maybe on Grand Avenue one day. Grand Avenue will unquestionably be the cultural hub of Downtown Los Angeles (refer to my sig) with the Gehry architecture, the Music Center, the Disney Concert Hall, MOCA etc.

edluva

12-02-2006, 01:31 AM

it's nice we're getting cultural insitutions downtown, but it's going to be hard to centralize our culture when both Getty's, LACMA, fashion, intellectual, and architecture hubs are all in the westside. But that's fine. but definitely, LA is more exciting right now than NY.

I particularly liked this article:

California dreaming

Dancing sugar plums, talking plants and a diner serving fossils ... Adrian Searle enters the weird world of LA art

Tuesday April 18, 2006
The Guardian
For decades the Los Angeles art world has been New York's twisted twin. LA artists have often been regarded as oblivious to theory, hedonistic and impenetrably experimental, their art a matter of oddball individuality and misguided thinking. But generalisations are neither useful nor accurate. The Pompidou Centre's mammoth exhibition Los Angeles, 1955-1985 confounds the stereotypes as much as it confirms them.
This rewarding, entertaining, often surprising exhibition is a crash course in 30 years of laconic California conceptualism, laidback LA pop art, occasionally silly and often highly confrontational performance, absurd and eccentric abstractions, funky and fetishistic minimalism, edgy, scatological sculptural tableaux, and dark and dirty underground film. They vie with one another, in room after room. The show opens with the roar of the MGM lion, looped in Jack Goldstein's short film, and ends with screenings of Kenneth Anger's Aleister Crowley-influenced 1970s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and an alarming and hilarious 1976 gay odyssey, Garage Sale, by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. The screenings are always packed. I think people secretly prefer movies to art.

Some films, of course, are more compelling than others. A man is teaching a plant to talk. He knows he must start with the basics, so he presents the weedy little potted plant with flashcards of the alphabet, and begins to recite. "A," he goes, "A," then "B". By the time we get to Q, I sense impatience creeping in, and I think the plant can feel it, too. It just sits there, like a timid five-year-old. It looks as if it might burst into tears.
This, you sigh, is typical California nonsense, but John Baldessari's grainy 1972 video Teaching a Plant the Alphabet has a lot of period charm, as well as a clunky kind of wit. For most of the 30-year period covered by this show, New York critics were apt to look down their noses at LA art, for its anti-formalism, its mess, its perceived infantilism and its narcissism - all of which seem to confirm a kind of stereotype of a southern California mindset.
For a long time, LA's art seemed to thrive on neglect. Baldessari has said he didn't have to please anyone, so "why not do this stuff. I think that's a great lesson ... not to care". Baldessari may have risked triviality - he shows a video here in which he mumbles "I am making art" over and over, while doing jerky little movements in front of the camera - but his work is always witty and self-deprecating. Of LA in the early 1960s, the painter Billy Al Bengston said: "Look, there was nobody buying painting. You could do anything you wanted."
In Bengston's case this meant making highly crafted abstractions, whose forms look like nothing so much as disconcerting mandalas, reminiscent of machine parts. His techniques and materials, as well as the forms in the paintings, were derived from painting fanciful designs on motorcycle cowlings and gas tanks. Craig Kauffman's translucent, vacuum-formed reliefs look like blown-up, psychedelic blister-packed pills or sweets. One can't imagine anyone living with them for long - except, perhaps, in the 1960s. But there is something endearing about such eccentricity. During the 1960s Joe Goode also made painting after painting in which one-colour canvases were conjoined with real milk bottles, overpainted in oils, which sat on little shelves in front of his paintings. Do not ask me why. They look almost as disconcerting, and certainly as fresh, as when they were painted.
Yet for every work like Goode's, Bengston's, or Kauffman's, for every sleek and faintly vacuous piece of "fetish finish" minimalism, or charmingly wry Ed Ruscha painting, there is an Ed Kienholz tableau, like his wretchedly depressing 1962 Illegal Operation, in which a sack-like female torso moulders on a rusty metal wheelchair, the bedpan under the seat a mess of dirty syringes, grimy forceps and fag ends. Or his wonderfully horrible 1964 While Visions of Sugar Plums Danced in Their Heads, in which two galumphing figures with monstrous heads lie abed in a room so rancid and dispiriting one wonders why they bother to stay alive at all. Such works as Keinholz's seem to prefigure the more dismal songs of Tom Waits, and the awful grisliness of the serial-killer-addicted Hollywood movies of the 80s and 90s.
East coast bafflement, as well as neglect, may not have been such a bad thing after all. And some of it was understandable. LA art is marked by its diversity, and accommodated differences to a degree that makes the New York art world look conformist and buttoned-up. At the same time, we should remember that contemporary art, until the 1980s, had a much smaller audience everywhere, and reactions to it were likely to be both uncomprehending and hostile. Yet who could quibble with Allen Ruppersberg's diner, where customers could order plates of stones, bits of wood, fossils or anything else the chef found lying about?
America's most important art magazine of the 1960s and 70s, Artforum, was born on the west coast, co-founded by a vituperative Brit, John Coplans. David Hockney famously moved to LA in the mid-60s. A little later, Bruce Nauman (who has never lived in New York) moved there from San Francisco. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader made LA his home in 1964, before being lost at sea while sailing from Cape Cod to Falmouth in 1975. The artists who passed through and the ones who stayed have made LA the only artistic centre in the US to rival New York. Andy Warhol first showed his soup can paintings in LA; Austrian actionist Herman Nitsch came to perform in the early 70s, influencing generations of California performance art; and Marcel Duchamp played chess with a naked model in the Pasedena Art Museum in 1963. LA may have had what seems a largely do-it-yourself art community during the 1950s and 60s, and it may have been far from New York, but it was not entirely isolated.
A milieu, a conversation, a critical mass of artists and ideas (as well as money and opportunity) create a scene. Los Angeles may in some respects have been a more commodious, better place to make art (if you care for all that sunshine, all that smog, all that driving) than New York, but to have a high-profile career in New York has, since the second world war, been the ambition of most American artists.
LA's problem has always been what the exhibition's curator, Catherine Grenier, calls its "octopoid geography". Whatever New York thinks of itself (and it thinks about itself a lot), it faces Europe. LA is far away. And although there were always collectors in Los Angeles, during the 60s and 70s they did little to encourage local, much less younger talent. Hence, perhaps, the edginess and aggression, the solipsism and individuality that marks the best Angeleno art.
Keinholz's confrontational approach, which he shared with other LA assemblage artists of the 1950s and 60s, resurfaced in the early performances of Paul McCarthy. A long 1975 video, Sailor's Meat, has McCarthy, crudely made-up, bewigged and wearing women's panties, fondling himself, smearing ketchup on his penis, rubbing sauce into his ass, and lost in some erotic reverie in front of the camera. There is some unseemly business with a frankfurter I shall pass over. This, in the end, is difficult to watch. One is stuck there with McCarthy, oneself, and one's own voyeurism. Works like this make one realise the limits of McCarthy's art, but also the vitality of performance in LA. In the early 1970s, Chris Burden was incarcerating himself in a locker for days on end. He had himself shot in the arm by a rifle, dumped on a busy LA freeway - at night, under a tarpaulin - and crucified on the body of a VW Beetle.
At the same time, Richard Diebenkorn was taking his daily walk between his home and studio, and painting his dignified, oddly poignant and beautiful Ocean Park paintings, influenced as much by Matisse's Piano Lesson as by his own habitual strolls in Ocean Park. Throughout the 1960s, Jay DeFeo was holed up in her studio, surviving on cognac and cigarettes, as she worked on one unfinishable painting, The Rose, that ended up weighing several tons. At the same time, James Turrell, Larry Bell and Robert Irwin were making perceptually distorting works whose purpose seemed to be to create an experience that was less about objects than space and light. At best these are more than perceptual games, although airy intimations of the spiritual seem to pervade their art. At least, unlike Bill Viola, they never made a big thing out of it. But that's California for you.
I much prefer art that's a little more concrete. The light and space artists no longer seem as interesting as they once did. The most visible LA artists to emerge during the 1980s - notably Charles Ray and Mike Kelley - made much out of the relationship between object-making and performance, and a suggested if not explicit narrative. During the 80s Ray made a number of works in which the artist's body was an integral element, while Kelley's tableaux also intimate a performance of some sort, frequently an event one feels better off for not having witnessed. These artists are now well known, and LA is no longer off the map, or ignorable; just as New York is no longer the centre of the international art world. In fact, there probably isn't one any more. Artists now can work almost anywhere. Welcome to LA.

citywatch

12-02-2006, 02:58 AM

I really think we're lacking in art museums. Museums like The Louvre and The Metropolitan Museum of Art! We need Guggenheim!
That's tougher to achieve today than ever before, certainly when a painting by Norman Rockwell just sold at auction for over $15 million. Also yesterday, an artwork by Edward Hopper, painted in 1955, just sold for $26.8 million.

Making matters worse, countries like Italy now are slamming museums, inc the Getty, for purchasing artworks that they claim were exported illegally.

bobcat

12-03-2006, 01:14 AM

It's not realistic to hope that LA will ever have a museum like the Louvre or Met because those museums have had a huge head start collecting art and great classical artworks are very scarce commodities. There are no more paintings to be purchased at any price by Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, or Raphael. Instead, what LA can do is be a great source of art, which it is doing right now with its great art schools, public and private contemporary art galleries, and arts patrons like Eli Broad and David Geffen. The November issue of Art in America focuses on Los Angeles and goes into detail about why many artists consider it one of the top cities for artists.

edluva

12-04-2006, 11:19 AM

I wonder whether the curated form of art will ever become obsolete.

ocman

12-04-2006, 11:56 AM

The Getty can afford it, but it limits itself in the period of art that it collects, and I don't see any sign that they are changing their ways. I think LA's contemporary art museums are doing a good job of building respectable collections. And if you look at LA Opera, The Getty, LA Phil, and MOCA, they've ascended into enviable positions much faster than they should have. LA Opera and MOCA, for instance, were just started in the 80s. MOCA has the most impressive collection in the US for contemporary art that I've been to.

ocman

12-06-2006, 09:40 AM

I spoke too soon. The most exciting news in art is about the Getty:

An artful choice
The Getty Trust appears to have found the man to rejuvenate L.A.'s most underachieving institution.
December 5, 2006

THE DIRECTORS OF the J. Paul Getty Trust picked a successor Monday to former President and Chief Executive Barry Munitz, who left the Getty under a cloud in February after months of disclosures about lavish perks and ethical lapses. And although the trustees say they weren't specifically looking for Munitz's polar opposite, they found one in James N. Wood, former head of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Wood, 65, has significant training and experience in the arts — in contrast not only to Munitz but also to the only other president the trust has had, Harold Williams. Munitz's background was in higher education, and Williams' was primarily in industry and finance. Wood is an arts scholar who worked as a curator and museum director before running the Art Institute, one of the country's leading art museums and schools, for 24 years.

Why does that matter? Because the Getty, despite its riches (its endowment, at more than $5 billion, is larger than any other art institution's), has been an artistic underachiever. Its acquisitions and exhibitions have never lived up to its resources. Its wealth may be obvious in its buildings but not in its collection.

Michael Brand, director of the Getty Museum since August 2005, is primarily responsible for rounding up better art. But having a chief executive with Wood's sensibilities and priorities can only be helpful. His tenure in Chicago was marked by several major acquisitions, so there's reason to believe the same will be true at the Getty. In addition, he's a different manager than Munitz, whose meddlesome style drove off some talented underlings and depressed morale. Wood is known for hiring good people and letting them do their jobs.

He also brings a reputation for scrupulous ethics. This is not the kind of guy who asks for a Porsche SUV as a company car, as Munitz did. Having just endured a state investigation of its leader's spending practices, the last thing the Getty needs is another leader who rents yachts.

The trust still has some festering problems to solve, including demands by Italy and Greece to return antiquities that were allegedly looted. Notably, Wood was one of the earliest to try to clear up such problems. The Art Institute of Chicago made pioneering use of the Internet to investigate those of its pieces with uncertain provenance.

And the Getty board, which seemed indifferent to Munitz's indiscretions, needs to demonstrate its engagement. By selecting Wood, the trustees have shown that they listen to critics. Wood's appointment is for just five years, but that could be ample time for the Getty to put the scandals behind it and start living up to its potential.

:banana: :cheers:

Such a concept. Imagine a museum actually focusing of art rather than yachting and sports cars! Now if the LA Times can get good owners, the city might be on the verge of a cultural renaissance.

ocman

12-06-2006, 10:09 AM

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/archives20061201.shtml#108042

Interview with the new Getty president at Artsjournal.com. Rest of the interview at the link above.

MAN: In recent years, in the Munitz years really, the Museum's pace of acquisitions has slowed. You've written a great deal (most recently in Whose Muse?) about how important it is for museums to actively collect. Do you want the Museum to return to its previous acquisitive ways?

JW: I'm not going to get too specific because I need to know more about the priorities of the different collecting areas. Collecting is absolutely essential to the metabolism of an institution like this. And that's not just collecting art, but collecting collections, and to go beyond that to collecting people. You need to keep growing.

The whole question is to focus on what's going to be the most intelligent way to use the means this institution has to make Los Angeles more cosmopolitan. One of the very appealing things about the Getty to me is that its collecting opportunities are really quite open. We were not left with an iron-clad restriction, so the opportunity is there to make the most of changing times — both in terms of the legality of acquisitions and in the cost and the importance of different cultures for both Los Angeles and the nation.

MAN: Given that Los Angeles is one of the two big producers of contemporary art in the United States and one of the four biggest producers in the world (to say nothing of LA's other creative industries), what should the Getty Trust’s relationship to contemporary art be?

JW: Contemporary art, contemporary culture is the water we swim in. The Getty needs to be very sensitive to that. Does that automatically mean we start competing with these other institutions in town that are collecting contemporary so brilliantly? I would argue not at all. I would say that the icons from St. Catherine's is the kind of thing that is essential to have happen in a metropolitan area where young artists are figuring out how to express their own culture. Show me any great artist and usually they will say, 'Here are the moments in the past I used to, in effect, learn how to deal with the present.' History doesn't have to be revoked from the contemporary. To me it's quite the opposite.

Also, MOCA gets it's due from Washingtonian Tyler Green in his art notes at ArtsJournal:

MOCA is the best-programmed contemporary art museum in America. (In the last couple years MOCA has originated or co-originated the Rauschenberg combines show, Masters of American Comics, Visual Music, the Robert Smithson retrospective, A Minimal Future?, Ecstasy, and more. No other American contemporary art museum has a record anywhere close to that.) MOCA has a strong, growing permanent collection. (True: It needs a place to show it.) No museum in America does as much with a $16.6 million annual budget.

ocman

12-06-2006, 10:16 AM

Christopher Knight at LA Times weighs in:
From the time James N. Wood left Williams College in western Massachusetts with undergraduate honors in art history 43 years ago, he has spent his life immersed in art and art museums. The news that the J. Paul Getty Trust has named a new president and chief executive would be important in any case, but it takes on special significance because it is Wood. His record as an art professional marks a Getty first.

For a quarter of a century, ever since it became clear that the Getty would become the nation's wealthiest art institution, with an endowment now valued at about $5.8 billion, the trust's board has looked to businessmen and corporate chieftains to run the place.

First, lawyer Harold Williams (1981 to 1997), former chairman of Norton Simon Inc. and head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, and then Barry Munitz (1998 to 2006), former vice president of Maxxam Inc. and chancellor of Cal State University, took the reins.

Regardless of their records at the Getty — Williams' mixed, Munitz's disastrous — the refusal to "trust the Trust" to an art professional has been the Getty's principal undoing.

Much has been achieved, but no one believes the Getty has come close to reaching its extraordinary cultural promise. Wood's appointment changes the equation.

His resume could not be more different from those of his predecessors. Wood has been an administrator or curator at four important art museums. He's held board positions at two others as well as at two major art schools and an art foundation.

Williams and Munitz both had experience in educational administration. Wood does too, but of a tellingly different kind. Chicago's highly regarded Art Institute is an encyclopedic museum partnered with an impressive art school.

A president sets an institutional tone, which resonates in ways not always immediately perceptible to outsiders. Despite fulsome Getty rhetoric about art collecting, scholarship, conservation and public service both here and abroad — indeed, despite demonstrable successes in all those areas — the tacit focus of a hugely rich art institution entrusted to corporate leadership could be characterized in three disappointing words: Protect the money.

With the unprecedented appointment of a distinguished art professional, four challenging words describe the charge: Spend the money well.

The appointment represents nothing less than a sea change for the Getty. From an administrative standpoint, the importance of having one's work championed by another art professional of great accomplishment cannot be overestimated. For an organization populated with skilled art professionals, that is institutional oxygen. Decisions become meaningful — consequential in ways that leadership from outside the field can never hope to match.

At 65, Wood might well be a transitional figure for the Getty. Known as a thoughtful and measured administrator, albeit one who is not afraid to think big, he will almost certainly be a stabilizing force at an organization still feeling battered from Munitz's ignominious tenure. The Getty is a complex place. Wood has the capacity to bring a measure of much-needed coherence to its far-flung program.

One immediate task will be to find a successor to Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute, who announced in October that he would leave next summer. A second pressing need is to assist the board's chairwoman, Louise H. Bryson, in building the ranks of trustees. Wood's extensive network of professional associations, accumulated over decades of art world leadership, ought to come in handy.

What might prove most difficult for the new president is grappling with a structural problem built into the Getty at its original home in Malibu and replicated, alas, at its Brentwood campus. The Getty Villa and the Getty Center both feel remote from the city's fabric, designed more for tourism than for civic engagement. The institution must function at both levels.

As director of Chicago's Art Institute, Wood brought a faltering museum back from the precipice. Leaving the post after 24 years, he told a local newspaper, "I can't imagine any other big city that I could really live in other than New York, I guess." Wood guessed wrong about that.

Los Angeles is its own peculiar beast with its own distinctive charms and challenges. The learning curve will be steep. For a pro, sitting atop the nation's wealthiest art institution ought to make the task, if not easy, certainly fun.

LosAngelesBeauty

12-09-2006, 02:02 AM

Museum of Neon Art may become homeless

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- One month after the Museum of Neon Art in downtown Los Angeles celebrates its 25th birthday, executive director Kim Koga will need to find a new facility.

The institution's lease expires at the end of January at the W. Olympic Boulevard location MONA has called home for 10 years, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Koga is looking for a new site for the museum while she seeks short-term storage for electric artworks, neon photographs, and icons like a Broadway Hollywood sign dating to 1931. She has looked at the old Subway Terminal Building, now an apartment building, and the basement of the Eastern Columbia building where lofts are being constructed.

Neither site panned out, the newspaper said. Constant increases in rent and redevelopment efforts in the downtown L.A. area challenge the 400-member museum operating on a $200,000 annual budget.

A fundraising party and silent auction are scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday at the Design Within Reach Store in Beverly Hills, Calif.

ocman

12-10-2006, 07:08 AM

LA now has to share it's magnificent conductor with London. :(

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1950313,00.html

London music on a high as Philharmonia lures Salonen

Martin Kettle
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian

The internationally acclaimed Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is to join the Philharmonia Orchestra in London as its principal conductor from next year, the Guardian can reveal. He will succeed Christoph von Dohnanyi, who has held the post since 1997.

For the past 14 years Salonen has been with the the Los Angeles Philharmonic, raising it to such a level that it is now regarded as America's top symphony orchestra. He will remain in charge in Los Angeles when be takes over the Philharmonia. The Philharmonia's coup in capturing Salonen - whose services the New York Philharmonic had made little secret of wanting - sets up the prospect of a new golden age for London's orchestras, three of which have recently secured the services of some of the most sought-after musical directors in the world.

Article continues
The London Philharmonic which, like the Philharmonia, will again be based at the Royal Festival Hall when the South Bank's current modernisation and rebuilding programme is completed in autumn 2007, will be headed by the Russian maestro Vladimir Jurowski, who takes over from Kurt Masur. Jurowski is also the music director of the Glyndebourne Festival.

The London Symphony, based at the Barbican, will be headed by the protean Ossetian conductor Valery Gergiev, who is due to take over from Sir Colin Davis in January 2007.

That leaves the Royal Philharmonic, headed since 1996 by the Italian conductor Daniele Gatti, as the only one of the four without a recent change at the top. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, which is sometimes regarded as London's "fifth orchestra" - though not by itself, as it is funded by the licence fee rather than by Arts Council England - also has a relatively new chief, the Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek.

In this new battle of the batons the only certain winners look likely to be the music public, who can look forward to an orchestral life of a quality and diversity with which no other city can compete.

Salonen's arrival in London on a permanent basis will make the Philharmonia the most natural home for contemporary music among the four. He is a prolific composer, and his own music is certain to feature in his programming plans. But his wide-ranging, non-traditional approach to his orchestras make him the closest thing any of them could have found to Sir Simon Rattle. Short of tempting Rattle back from the Berlin Philharmonic, it is hard to think of a more exciting appointment for the Philharmonia to have made.

Salonen, who studied horn, conducting and composing in Helsinki in the 1970s, considered himself a conducting composer until his London debut in 1983, when he took over a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Philharmonia at short notice. He became a composing conductor virtually overnight.

bobcat

12-10-2006, 07:39 AM

For the past 14 years Salonen has been with the the Los Angeles Philharmonic, raising it to such a level that it is now regarded as America's top symphony orchestra.

"Quality" rankings are always subjective, but LA Phil and SF Symphony are regular cited as the two most forward looking orchestras in the country, both more willing to present works by modern composers than their peer orchestras in the East. Also, LA Phil now has the largest annual budget of any symphony orchestra in the country, and while that may or may not be an indication of its overall quality, it's usually the case that larger budget organizations are able to offer the highest salaries in order to attract the most talented performers.

dragonsky

12-18-2006, 07:13 AM

Nearly bare Bruins will brave the chilly night
UCLA's Undie Run strips away some of the pressure of finals week -- and most of the normal student attire. Tonight's the night.
By Charles Proctor, Times Staff Writer
December 13, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2006-12/26858732.jpg

UCLA senior Mike Valkosky plans to commemorate final exams tonight by dropping his pants.

But the 21-year-old sociology major faces a tough choice: Should he try a pair of boxers this year or stick with his trusty green Speedo?

Valkosky isn't the only student who's struggling with such questions. In what has become a tradition at the Westwood campus, thousands of students mark the Wednesday of exams week by running across campus in the dead of night clad in nothing but their underwear.

Turnout for the quarterly event, known as the Undie Run, has soared since theater-major Eric Whitehead first dashed solo in his underwear through the streets of Westwood west of the campus four years ago. Last June, more than 5,000 people followed in his footsteps, frolicking and flaunting in their most intimate apparel.

But the growth worries administrators and UCLA police, who see potential for property damage and injury as people from outside UCLA and even outside Los Angeles converge on campus to watch, snap pictures and shoot video. Some administrators and students speculate it's only a matter of time before the Undie Run gets too big for its britches and is shut down.

UCLA is not the only university with student traditions that involve partial or even full-on nudity. A student group at UC San Diego called "Students for a Sexier Campus" has an Undie Run that was inspired in part by the UCLA event. Students at the University of Florida host "The Great Underwear Dash." And UC Berkeley and Harvard, among others, have or had traditions involving students streaking during exams.

UCLA's Undie Run stands apart for its size, even though it has no formal leaders, except perhaps the runners at the head of the pack.

Word spreads via online social networking sites, e-mail and old-fashioned word of mouth. At midnight, students gather at the northernmost corner of Gayley and Landfair avenues. The half-mile route goes from Gayley through the courtyard of UCLA's De Neve residential suites and down the main campus thoroughfare, known as Bruin Walk. The event is not university-sanctioned, though it is monitored by administrators and UCLA police.

The bashful get away with a T-shirt and boxers, but many show up with far less. Men wear boxers, briefs or — for the very self-assured — thongs. Women wear all varieties of lingerie.

Some skip the underwear altogether. Instead, they don palm fronds, beer boxes or a strategically positioned party hat. "One dude," recalled history major Chase Norfleet, 23, wore "just a sock." Running shoes are optional but recommended.

Originally, the run wound through apartments in Westwood, but when more than 1,000 people showed up in 2004 and people reported students running over parked cars, the UCLA administration took serious notice.

In March, administrators steered the route away from the streets of Westwood and onto campus in the hopes of keeping students safe while allowing them the "college experience."

The change, said Bob Naples, vice chancellor of student and campus life, also was made to stave off police intervention. For now, students are asked to monitor themselves.

"If we reach the point where something happens or, God forbid, someone is injured or assaulted," Naples said, "I think the university and the police would have no qualms about stepping in and doing something to end it."

The new route is far from perfect. Some students who live in De Neve suites have complained about the noise. During the June Undie Run, students jumped into Shapiro fountain outside Powell library, causing about $25,000 worth of damage. Tonight, the fountain will be turned off.

The new route takes away the run's rebellious and spontaneous quality, some students say.

"When there are rules, it loses some of the Undie Run essence," said Zoe Brown, 21, an anthropology major from Novato.

Police and administrators are still concerned about the number of gawkers who come from off campus. Brown is considering not doing the run this year because of the people who show up with video equipment. "I could be on YouTube right now," she said.

Whitehead, now an actor and singer in New York, founded the Undie Run on a whim. At the time, he recalled, he was disgusted at what he thought was an overbearing police presence in Westwood during finals week. So he started walking the streets at night, singing a "short and distasteful" song.

When police didn't cite him, Whitehead "started wondering: How far can I take this? Then someone said, 'Well, why don't you just run around in your underwear?' And I thought: 'Why not?'

"So I dropped the shorts and started running."

Whitehead printed fliers and encouraged his roommates to join in as he coaxed the Undie Run to life. Crowds grew from a handful to the hundreds, and by the time Whitehead graduated, the run "was definitely its own beast."

Whitehead is proud that the tradition has taken off, but he believes it will probably shut down some day, given the life cycle of student traditions. "It's kind of an inevitability."

Until then, students like Valkosky embrace the tradition that Whitehead blazed in his boxers. Valkosky's done the Undie Run every quarter since he was a sophomore. Last year, he wore a bandanna and a green Speedo.

"I'm going to go into a career where I have to keep my clothes on," he said. "So I might as well do it now."

dragonsky

12-18-2006, 07:16 AM

UCLA students mark finals with 'Undie Run'
By Charles Proctor, Times Staff Writer
11:23 AM PST, December 14, 2006
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In what has become a tradition at the Westwood campus, thousands of students marked exams week in the dead of night by running across campus clad in nothing but their underwear.

Turnout for the quarterly event, known as the Undie Run, has soared since theater major Eric Whitehead first dashed solo in his underwear through the streets of Westwood west of the campus four years ago. UCLA police estimated that as many as 4,000 people turned up last night, down from more than 5,000 who showed up last year to frolic and flaunt their most intimate apparel.

Administrators and UCLA police were on alert for potential property damage and injury as people from outside UCLA converged on the campus to watch, snap pictures and shoot video. Some administrators and students speculated that it was only a matter of time before the Undie Run gets too big for its britches and is shut down.

Last night, however, there were no reports of any serious problems, according to Nancy Greenstein, director of community services for the campus police.

UCLA is not the only university with student traditions that involve partial or even full-on nudity. A student group at UC San Diego called Students for a Sexier Campus has an Undie Run that was inspired in part by the UCLA event. Students at the University of Florida host The Great Underwear Dash. And UC Berkeley and Harvard, among others, have or had traditions involving students streaking during exams.

UCLA's Undie Run stands apart for its size, even though it has no formal leaders, except perhaps the runners at the head of the pack.

Word spread via online social networking sites, e-mail and old-fashioned word of mouth. At midnight, students gathered at Gayley and Landfair avenues. The half-mile route went from Gayley through the courtyard of UCLA's De Neve residential suites and down the main campus thoroughfare, known as Bruin Walk. The event is not university-sanctioned, though it is monitored by administrators and UCLA police.

The bashful got away with a T-shirt and boxers, but many showed up with far less. Men wore boxers, briefs or -- for the very self-assured -- thongs. Women wore all varieties of lingerie.

Some skipped the underwear altogether. Instead, palm fronds, beer boxes or a strategically positioned party hat are used in the event. "One dude," recalled history major Chase Norfleet, 23, wore "just a sock."

Originally, the run wound through apartments in Westwood, but when more than 1,000 people showed up in 2004 and people reported students running over parked cars, the UCLA administration took serious notice.

In March, administrators steered the route away from the streets of Westwood and onto campus in the hopes of keeping students safe while allowing them the "college experience."

The change, said Bob Naples, vice chancellor of student and campus life, also was made to stave off police intervention. For now, students are asked to monitor themselves.

"If we reach the point where something happens or, God forbid, someone is injured or assaulted," Naples said, "I think the university and the police would have no qualms about stepping in and doing something to end it."

The new route is far from perfect. Some students who live in De Neve suites have complained about the noise. During the June Undie Run, students jumped into Shapiro fountain outside Powell library, causing about $25,000 worth of damage. The fountain was turned off before the event.

The new route took away the run's rebellious and spontaneous quality, some students said.

"When there are rules, it loses some of the Undie Run essence," said Zoe Brown, 21, an anthropology major from Novato.

Police and administrators are still concerned about the number of gawkers who come from off campus. Brown was considering not doing the run this year because of the people who show up with video equipment. "I could be on YouTube right now," she said.

Whitehead, now an actor and singer in New York, founded the Undie Run on a whim. At the time, he recalled, he was disgusted at what he thought was an overbearing police presence in Westwood during finals week. So he started walking the streets at night, singing a "short and distasteful" song.

When police didn't cite him, Whitehead "started wondering: How far can I take this? Then someone said, 'Well, why don't you just run around in your underwear?' And I thought: Why not?

"So I dropped the shorts and started running."

Whitehead printed fliers and encouraged his roommates to join in as he coaxed the Undie Run to life. Crowds grew from a handful to the hundreds, and by the time Whitehead graduated, the run "was definitely its own beast."

Whitehead is proud that the tradition has taken off, but he believes it will probably be shut down some day, given the life cycle of student traditions. "It's kind of an inevitability."

Until then, students such as senior Mike Valkosky embraced the tradition that Whitehead blazed in his boxers. Valkosky's done the Undie Run every quarter since he was a sophomore. Last year, he wore a bandanna and a green Speedo.

"I'm going to go into a career where I have to keep my clothes on," said the 21-year-old sociology major before this year's run. "So I might as well do it now."

fflint

12-18-2006, 07:42 AM

^For running around on campus in your underwear times, make it...UCLA time!

I wish they'd done this while I was still there (graduated in 2000).

edluva

12-19-2006, 08:55 AM

I wish I went there now. Sounds so democratic and liberating. Now *that's* a tradition.

bjornson

12-21-2006, 08:10 AM

Putting the 'art' in party
At gatherings grand and humble, art makes for a potent mixer across L.A.

By Chris Lee, Times Staff Writer

Both literally and figuratively, Los Angeles is drunk on art.

Blame the Southland's vast brain trust of freethinkers and major league collectors, its panoply of new galleries and top-ranked art schools, and even a nascent "art bar" culture: The City of Angels has indisputably become this hemisphere's most overheated, over-hyped contemporary art boomtown.

But the art world social scene here has never exactly been what you'd call avant garde. At least not when it comes to feting homegrown talent and younger arts patrons outside established templates — black-tie institutional galas and Two Buck Chuck-fueled boho get-togethers being the perfunctory modes of celebrating modern art. And in terms of connecting it in any organic way to the entertainment industry, fashion, celebrity, indie rock and hipsterdom, L.A. still looks east for inspiration.

In recent weeks, however, several art-related events — in Hollywood, Elysian Park, West Hollywood and Culver City, respectively — have signaled an evolution in how Los Angeles will party in the name of art.

Each event derived a cerebral glamour from differing points on the pop-art continuum, crossing time-honored social divides in the process and raising both money for and awareness about Angeleno cultural life in the process.

In the view of York Chang, a figurative painter and multimedia installation artist who also happens to be a commissioner of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, changes in the art world social milieu may reflect a larger cultural shift.

"You're seeing more and more people tapping intersections between art and our civic culture," he said. "It's great for the city. And all the partying is great for art. It plays an important function. At the heart of great art is great social energy."

The November party "Baby's All Grown Up" served as a meta-narrative deconstruction of what an art opening is and isn't supposed to be, featuring the work of seven emergent local artists and the intrusive presence of surveillance cameras. Another event last month, pARTy 2006, distinguished itself from previous arts institution membership galas with a fresh infusion of Hollywood glamour: by commingling the glitterati (and many of their agents) with the city's culturati. "Free Money," a free weekly event at the Mandrake Bar in Culver City, manages to unite disparate Angeleno tribes — galleristas, fashion victims, starving artists and the skinny jeans set — by throwing casually outlandish theme parties. And earlier this month, the KCRW-sponsored fifth anniversary party for arts collective Create:Fixate, a bimonthly multimedia event, featured a cross-section of emerging lowbrow and fine artists, electronic musicians and purveyors of bohemian clothing and accessories, not to mention a troupe of dancing Santas.

"People communicate here through parties," said Bettina Korek, an influential contemporary-art marketing consultant. "But a lot of people are getting sick of just going out for the sake of going out. They're looking for an enriching experience. That leads them to want to make art a part of their lifestyles."

In a spoofing mood

At Marvimon House, a cavernous former car showroom turned chic event space located in the shadow of Chavez Ravine, guests entering "Baby's All Grown Up" were confronted first by a paparazzi-style photographer snapping pictures of everyone who entered the event, then by a boom-mounted digital video camera inside that swooped through the crowd in an effort to record the action — but also to "challenge the conventional definition of an art exhibition," according to curator/co-organizer Veronica Fernandez, a freelance curator and art advisor.

"It's a celebration of art but at the same time, it's poking fun at the entire thing," said Fernandez, who marked her 28th birthday that night. "It's cynical."

Art world grandees, a smattering of art school students and some big-ticket collectors — 150 people in all, most of whom paid $99 to attend — supped on a roundelay of gourmet hors d'oeuvres created from recipes by famous artists (post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne's seared albacore crudo with citrus marinated jicama salad was one of the highlights, as was the fifth course: meatloaf sandwich à la Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell). Music came courtesy of the alt-country band Pillbilly Nights and DJ Eddie Ruscha (whose namesake father, Ed, is a certified pop art superstar).

Many attendees seemed visibly out of their depth so far east of the 405. But it helped that they could sip a different designer cocktail with every course amid sculptural floral arrangements by artist Holly Vesecky and installation art by rising stars such as Tim Doyle, Franco Mondini-Ruiz and Chuck Moffitt.

The idea was to have everyone interact with, eat, sniff and drink in the art rather than regard it from a detached emotional distance. "It's a crazy environment," said Cathy Akers, whose sexy-naif nature diorama sculpture, "Natural Selection 2," was on display. "You're part of the performance even if people are supposed to be looking at your work."

A guest who identified himself as Johnny Radio added: "Everyone here is artsy and beautiful and — how can I put it? — hungry. There's a high possibility of an orgy."

Coming together

Sponsored by the New Yorker magazine and held at Gemini G.E.L., a venerable artist workshop and publisher of limited edition prints and sculptures, pARTy 2006 was nominally intended as a membership drive for young supporters of local cultural institutions: L.A. Opera's ARIA group, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's President's Circle Avant-Garde membership group, the Museum of Contemporary Art's MOCA Contemporaries, the Los Angeles Music Center's Proscenium Club and WOW, a nonprofit initiative of the Art Production Fund.

In application, however, the party was a perfect storm of cultural bigwigs and Creative Artists Agency suits, movie producers, socialites and demi-celebrities, artists and those wishing to bask in their reflected limelight at a time when nine-figure contemporary art sales (such as David Geffen's recent $140-million "de-acquisition" of a Jackson Pollock painting) have become the new normal.

Veteran club promoter-turned-DJ Brent Bolthouse spun Lou Reed and Creedence Clearwater Revival records just yards from a print workshop crammed with big-ticket works on paper by John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. Model-actress-celebutante Devon Aoki rubbed elbows with the likes of MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel and Rosette Delug, a board member for the Armand Hammer Museum. And a disparate group of boldfaced names, including actress Jordana Brewster, LAXART director-curator Lauri Firstenberg, celebrity interviewer Steven "Cojo" Cojocaru and model-turned-gallery owner Honor Fraser, could be spotted among the 500-strong throng of Angeleno jeunesse d'orée.

The seemingly effortless — yet far-reaching — social networking efforts of Bettina Korek, who organized the event, weren't lost on guest Erin Wright, a board liaison for LACMA.

"What she's done that's so interesting is to get together Hollywood with people who read and people who think," Wright said. "It's the arts and music in town coming together — a great amalgamation of interests."

Andrew Berardini, who contributes to Artforum's Scene & Herd column (artforum.com), assessed the scene more bluntly. "This event is the art world trying to crash into the entertainment world — or vice versa," he said. Operatic tenor David Lomeli began to serenade the crowd with a rendition of "No Puede Ser."

"Look around you," Berardini said, gesturing at the well-dressed crowd throwing back complimentary Don Julio Tequila margaritas and Reyka Vodka pomegranate martinis. "It's working!" Indeed, that night nearly three dozen new members signed on to the various patrons groups, in some cases at $1,000 a pop.

See art and be seen

Even further down the economic food chain, the crashing of worlds can be heard. The arts collective Create:Fixate may have begun life as a downtown loft venue showcasing emerging artists. But five years in, the bimonthly extravaganza — which is "freaky, like in a Burning Man kind of way," in the words of one repeat attendee — draws a crowd intent on seeing art but also on being seen while seeing art. Pajama parties, people on stilts, hot tubs and drag queens have historically been part of the equation.

No exception was its "Alive in Los Angeles" event earlier this month that commemorated Create:Fixate's wood anniversary. Sponsored by KCRW and the Onion, the event had more than 30 visual artists participate, including experimental sculptors, photographers, fashion designers, video artists and painters.

And unlike most pinkie-in-the-air, Chardonnay-in-the-gut arts soirees, this one had a family-friendly component: the so-called "Creativity Kids Zone," where the "Hannah Montana" demographic could finger-paint while their parents, ahem, created and fixated.

The Audio Lab involved live bands, spoken-word performers and nearly half a dozen DJs, including John Tejada, Der Kontraktor, Slang Min and Drifter.

On the edge of now

Along with the Mountain Bar in Chinatown, Culver City's Mandrake has become L.A.'s ranking art bar — a drinking hole situated on the La Cienega gallery corridor that's run by and for artists. The former gay leather joint regularly exhibits new work and hosts art talks in its cavernous back room.

But every Wednesday since September, the Mandrake has also been home to "Free Money," a casual, guest-list-free event that pulls in those on the cutting edge of now (fashion plate-actress Chloë Sevigny, for one) with "conceptual" iPod DJ-ing and outlandish themes — "proto rave," "John Peel night" after the venerable English indie rock DJ, and "the Kate Moss make-out party," intended as a woozy, sexy supermodel homage, rank among "Free Money's" more memorable nights.

According to Ezra Woods, one of the event's three "hosts" (part of a collective called Indole that resists being pigeonholed as party promoters), "Free Money's" unique chemistry is indivisible from its gallery-centric location. "The arty crowd here is definitely a selling point," he said. "The art world is definitely fabulous. And the gallery crowd attracts other creative people: writers, fashion designers, dancers, some actors."

Last week was "singles night" at "Free Money." And although no one would quite cop to being on the make — no Binaca blasts or Drakkar Noir here — an unmistakable Echo Park hipster contingent made its way to the Westside for the event. As did a clutch of local cultural shot-callers: among them, MOCA's assistant director of board affairs Ari Wiseman; Eugenie Joo, director of the gallery at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater; cultural commissioner York Chang and Andrea Feldman Falcione, curator of '80s power agent Mike Ovitz's powerhouse modern art collection.

As the night wore on, women with $2,000 purses mingled with scruffy artists whose street-savvy fashion style tended toward a look that can be described only as "post-grooming." People danced to the Brit-pop of Pulp and Morrissey beneath the "no dancing" sign in the back room, Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" flickered from a projector against a wall.

"The mix of people is really interesting," said Tiffany Tuttle, designer for the footwear line LD Tuttle. "It's cool but not too cool for school."

Which, when it comes down to it, seems to be the way L.A. likes to put the "art" in party.

LosAngelesBeauty

12-27-2006, 03:16 PM

Collectors' additions

L.A.'s cultural life, as measured by the catalogs of its museums and libraries, got a bit richer this year. Here are some of the things to be thankful for.

By Christopher Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

December 24, 2006

CUE the "Addams Family" theme. Now lay out that old leather-bound Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on a sturdy table, keep the Calydonian boar clear of the African elephant tusks, and step right this way to check out Charles Bukowski's crude scribbles.

Yes, from these attractions it may seem that the Ringling Bros. Library of Congress Aesthetic Pleasure Faire has come to town at last. But all of these wonders, along with reams of duller, more important scholarly items, have joined the collections of museums and libraries in greater Los Angeles this year.

The original score for the "Addams Family" theme? Composed 42 years ago by Vic Mizzy, who donated the original score to UCLA in May.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? That's the 19th century deal that added California to the United States. After two decades of searching for a first-edition copy, a USC librarian happily paid "four figures" for one this year.

The boar — actually, an oil painting of a boar, surrounded by hunters and nervous horses and painted by Peter Paul Rubens in about 1611 — now belongs to the Getty Museum, which bought it in April from a London dealer, price undisclosed. Rubens drew the image from an episode in Ovid's poetry, but the alarm in the animals' eyes seems immediate enough to provoke a PETA demonstration.

The tusks — real tusks, 8 feet long and 332 pounds together — were removed from their central African owner in 1897 and donated to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County last month by William Cherry, a dentist in the Lake Tahoe area.

As for the Bukowski scrawls, for now let's just say the stubbled bard of San Pedro never lived in a home as nice as the one now housing his papers.

Deals like these have made 2006 a lively year for donations and purchases throughout the region, curators and librarians say, but then, most years are. It's just that the rest of the world rarely notices.

Whether they are paintings, diaries, photographs, musical scores, old clothes or correspondence, most artifacts and archives land quietly, get swaddled in acid-free paper and alphabetically shelved, all without much public notice unless there's a big celebrity involved.

While you weren't looking, the Natural History Museum added not only the tusks but a rare 14.6-foot oarfish from Catalina, the "XX" armband from Charlie Chaplin's uniform in "The Great Dictator" (1940) and sundry mineral specimens from the mines of Bisbee, Ariz.

The Museum of Contemporary Art added more than 100 works, including half a dozen small Robert Motherwell ink-on-paper works, 13 Jennifer Bornstein prints and etchings, and Fred Tomaselli's "Hang Over," a contemporary work made with leaves, pills, acrylic and resin on a 7-by-10-foot wood panel.

The Hammer Museum added more than 100 sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs and drawings

The Norton Simon Museum added a pencil-and-ink portrait by Don Bachardy of, well, Norton Simon. (Simon died in 1993; this addition ties in with the museum's celebration of Simon's centennial in 2007.)

The Southwest Museum of the American Indian (now largely closed as its parent, the Autry National Center, shores up the bedraggled Southwest building and plans expansion in Griffith Park) added 37 Pomo baskets.

Reading the material

INDIVIDUALLY, Bisbee minerals and Pomo baskets may not inspire dancing in the streets. But a year's acquisitions, surveyed at once, can reveal plenty — not only about how culture endures, but about institutional ambitions.

For instance, the Getty — so mired in recriminations over its past deals that it has given four works back to Greece and offered 26 more to Italy — isn't buying so many ancient vases any more. And the Museum of the American West in Griffith Park, which was founded less than 20 years ago on the fortune and show-business artifacts of Gene Autry, hasn't been snapping up singing-cowboy memorabilia.

Instead, both institutions — the one with roots in Western civilization and the one with roots in western serialization — have lately turned to photography. Contemporary American photography in particular. In the last 12 months, in fact, both have bought works by living photographers John Divola and Jerry Uelsmann.

Of course, with the deepest pockets in all the museum world, the Getty could also afford the Rubens; a 14th century illustrated manuscript page by Pacino di Bonaguida; a 17th century Dutch drawing by Anthonie van Borssom; a 17th century painting by Spanish artist Juan de Valdés Leal; and a raft of further acquisitions by the Getty Research Institute.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, director Michael Govan arrived in April and spent much of his first three months on the job trying to quietly raise money to buy five Gustav Klimt paintings that had been seized by the Nazis in the 1930s, held by Austria for decades, then restituted to the surviving family of owner Adele Bloch-Bauer. But while the paintings were on view at LACMA, the behind-the-scenes bidding leaped beyond the museum's means. In the end, the works were sold individually to out-of-town or anonymous buyers, together fetching more than $325 million.

Still, LACMA's registrar had 320 acquisitions to log, the list topped by Jacques-Louis David's oil portrait of Jean-Pierre Delahaye, painted in 1815. With the Ahmanson Foundation footing the bill, the museum bought the painting at auction in Paris for $2.7 million from Delahaye's descendants in June. It went on public display for the first time in October.

Among the museum's other additions: a Tiffany lamp (donated by Richard and Nancy Daly Riordan), a 17th century Buddhist priest's mantle from Japan and a 1926 Johan Hagemeyer photo of grain elevators.

Sometimes, however, acquisitions aren't a matter of curators chasing down long-sought treasures. Acquisitions are also a matter of what's for sale, what donors have to give and what new possibilities a museum or library is ready to embrace. The result, especially at university special collections libraries, is a soup-to-nuts repast of artifacts to feed hungry grad students for generations.

Apart from the "Addams Family" score and its ripe-for-analysis lyrics ("they're all together ooky"), UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library department of special collections has taken on dozens of European Renaissance manuscripts; papers from painter R.B. Kitaj and writer Susan Sontag (who died in 2004); and some 1,500 documents, photos and scarves from modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan (but not the scarf that fatally snapped her neck in a 1927 auto accident).

From Massachusetts neurosurgeon and pain-research pioneer William H. Sweet (who died in 2001), there's a set of gold-tipped operating instruments. From novelist and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon, who created the TV shows "I Dream of Jeannie, "The Patty Duke Show" and "Hart to Hart," there's a stack of manuscripts.

And speaking of screen work, the Mizzy contribution didn't stop with the family Addams. UCLA now also has Mizzy's scores for "Green Acres" and such films as "The Reluctant Astronaut," "The Ghost and Mister Chicken" and "The Shakiest Gun in the West." Somewhere, the late Don Knotts is smiling.

Not to be outdone, the special collections librarians at USC have acquired photos of the Hungarian uprising of 1956; correspondence of 20th century Chinese novelist Eileen Chang (a.k.a. Zhang Ai Ling); and the archives of composer Elmer Bernstein, whose five-decade career included scores for "The Great Escape," "The Magnificent Seven," "The Man With the Golden Arm," "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and "Animal House," among many others.

But the USC acquisition with the most political resonance may be its newly purchased first-edition copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That war-ending 1848 document — signed under duress by Mexican leaders with U.S. troops occupying Mexico City — formalized American annexation of not only California but Nevada, Texas and Utah, along with parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. For that territory, the U.S. paid about $18 million. For a first-edition copy of the document — one of just 17 known in American libraries — USC librarian for Iberian and Latin American studies Barbara Robinson was ready to pay up to $10,000.

"It's the document that establishes our border with Mexico," said Robinson, who began hunting for a copy for USC's Boeckmann collection almost immediately after her arrival at the university in 1985.

Alerted over the summer by a dealer to a copy coming up for auction, Robinson authorized the dealer to bid. He got it for less than Robinson's limit — she won't say exactly how much less — and today it rests under lock and key at USC, 55 pages, nearly mint condition, bound in leather and printed in English and Spanish.

"I think it's important for students who do a lot of online research to see what the actual documents look like, to see the artifacts themselves," Robinson said. "You see the paper, you see the print, and it transports you back to that time period."

As disparate as the additions at UCLA and USC may seem, however, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino may have taken an even more diverse cargo aboard this year.

On one hand, there is the meticulous: the Huntington's new Burndy Library, 67,000 books on the history of science and technology over four centuries. Amassed by inventor and industrialist Bern Dibner, the collection was a gift, the library's largest single acquisition since magnate Henry Huntington founded the place in 1919.

Then there's the sublime — the Charles Bukowski papers, from the late hard-drinking, plain-spoken poet and novelist of "Barfly" fame. His widow, Linda Lee Bukowski, donated a trove of his resolutely unrarefied writings (one manuscript poem considers farts and foghorn blasts), which now rests more or less alongside the library's Gutenberg Bible and its rare editions of Shakespeare and Chaucer and papers from Jack London and Christopher Isherwood.

"This would tickle my husband," said Linda Lee Bukowski at the June announcement of the donation. "It would crack him up."

christopher.reynolds@latimes.com

dcmcgov

01-08-2007, 08:29 AM

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/2111/untitledxm3.png (http://imageshack.us)

I find it almost unfathomable that 3 socal counties are in the top 5 (LA, OC & SD), with almost 500,000 millionares between them, and we don't have more philantropy.

And aside from philantropy and culture & the arts... with those numbers in mind, I'm dumbfounded that a Chicagoan bought our newspaper, a Bostonian bought our Dodgers, a guy from Phoenix bought the Angels... we still have no NFL team in LA. Where is the civic pride?

NYC has more billionaires.

I don't think that is true. I recently read an article (I've got to try and find it) that stated that LA also has the most billionaires. There is one stretch of beach in Malibu called "Billionaire's Row" because it has 10 or so billionaires living on the same beach.

Wealth always finds it's way into the hands of those who do the least with it.

dcmcgov

01-08-2007, 08:33 AM

I think it is the case with NY that many millionaires have their official residence in a lower tax state, that skews the ^^^ chart.

The same is true with California, especially socal. Many incorporate or keep residence in Nevada or Arizona because of higher taxes in here. The chart is accurate.

edluva

01-08-2007, 09:03 AM

not sure how the list is tallied, but LA has an unusual number of millionaires with their money in overseas assets. some people might even appear under poverty for their lack of income.

bjornson

01-08-2007, 09:15 AM

I find it almost unfathomable that 3 socal counties are in the top 5 (LA, OC & SD), with almost 500,000 millionares between them, and we don't have more philantropy.

And aside from philantropy and culture & the arts... with those numbers in mind, I'm dumbfounded that a Chicagoan bought our newspaper, a Bostonian bought our Dodgers, a guy from Phoenix bought the Angels... we still have no NFL team in LA. Where is the civic pride?

I have the same exact feeling. I mention that there's no real philanthropy here for the arts or anything else to do with L.A. with the exception of Broad, Geffen, Burkle, and that one guy from Orange County.

I don't think that is true. I recently read an article (I've got to try and find it) that stated that LA also has the most billionaires. There is one stretch of beach in Malibu called "Billionaire's Row" because it has 10 or so billionaires living on the same beach.

Wealth always finds it's way into the hands of those who do the least with it.

I don't think that is true. I recently read an article (I've got to try and find it) that stated that LA also has the most billionaires. There is one stretch of beach in Malibu called "Billionaire's Row" because it has 10 or so billionaires living on the same beach.

Wealth always finds it's way into the hands of those who do the least with it.

Really? I was referring to the city of Los Angeles only when I said New York has more billionaires. According to Forbes, NY has 45 billionaires and LA. has 23 (Forbes thinks the number is 19, but then they go on to list Holmby Hills, Bel Air, and Pacific Palisades which are a part of the city of LA). Also, Forbes states that Malibu only has two billionaires :shrug: . If, however, we were to do the county or the metro, then perhaps it would have more than NY. Ed knows what the hell I'm talking about.

Oh, yeah, ed! I never really thought about that.

bobcat

01-29-2007, 10:20 PM

Good to see a major local art collection actually remaining in LA for a change, although it would have been nice if it were a bit more accessible to the general public.

A museum that'll stay in move-in condition
By Suzanne Muchnic
Times Staff Writer

January 28, 2007

FRED WEISMAN couldn't help it. He just had to buy all that art and stuff it into his house and gardens.

During a decade of residence at his Mediterranean-style estate in Holmby Hills, he put Modern classics in the living room, Surrealist paintings in the dining room and an eclectic array of high-spirited contemporary art everywhere else.

A giant cat by Fernando Botero stands by the swimming pool. Pop paintings by Roy Lichtenstein grace the lanai. A sculpture of a sexy nude woman by John d'Andrea perches on a bedroom sofa. Startlingly realistic life-size figures by Duane Hanson — a woman with a vacuum cleaner, a dozing old man and likenesses of Weisman's parents — pop up in various settings. Even the mailbox is a work of art, a sculpture of a hand and forearm by Frank Fleming.

When Weisman ran out of space, he covered windows, mounted paintings on ceilings and built a spacious modern annex to display more art. At his death in 1994, he had amassed a 1,500-piece collection and installed about 500 of those objects in and around his home.

The point of collecting art, Weisman thought, was to enjoy it, live with it and share it — forever. His will decreed that the art-filled property be kept intact and maintained as a museum.

"He wanted this to be an example of living with art in the late 20th century," says his second wife, art conservator Billie Milam Weisman. She directs the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, overseeing the art holdings and lending works to museums worldwide. At the moment, a Weisman painting by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a 125-piece show from the collection is at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans.

Many people have seen the fruits of Weisman's collecting, at his house and elsewhere — the foundation has quietly conducted tours of the highly unusual estate since his death. But now Weisman's wish is an officially sanctioned reality. The foundation has the approval of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission to operate the house as a museum in a single-family residential neighborhood.

"Fred thought people were intimidated by art in museums, but less so when it is in homes," Billie Weisman says. "We are making Fred proud by continuing to operate the way he wanted it."

The museum is open free, by appointment only, Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The first tour begins at 10:30 a.m., the last one at 2 p.m. Operating on a highly restricted basis, the foundation is prohibited from publishing its address or street name. Prospective visitors gain access by making reservations via e-mail at tours@weismanfoundation.org or by telephone (310) 277-5321. Guests must park their cars inside the walled compound.

Fortunate turn of events

THE job of turning the Weisman estate into a museum fell to attorney Elizabeth Watson of Greenberg Glusker LLP. The impetus was a complaint to the city Department of Building and Safety from an unidentified neighbor, Watson says. When city officials followed up with a visit to the house, they informed the foundation that it must stop operating the museum or get the necessary approval.

"What's fortunate in this case is that the city of Los Angeles actually has a very special provision for what they call 'public benefit projects,' " Watson says. "It hasn't been in place very long, and it's been used primarily for city projects, municipal buildings. We utilized that section of the code which allows public benefit projects like museums and libraries in any zone in the city if you meet certain requirements. It allows the city to impose special conditions to be sure the use is compatible with the neighborhood.

"The other aspect that worked strongly in our favor," she says, "was that the foundation was using an existing single-family home, so the appearance of the building and grounds are entirely consistent with the neighborhood. We weren't building something that looked different. And, of course, that's really the essence of the Weisman museum. It's first and foremost a single-family estate. The core mission of the foundation — to preserve Fred Weisman's home as he lived in it with his art — was very consistent with the values in the city zoning code."

Nonetheless, the approval process took about a year to complete. The foundation needed discretionary special approvals from the city, including a public benefit project approval and variances on parking and the height of the wall and hedge along the front of the property.

Watson also worked with the foundation to get community support, including an endorsement from the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council, and negotiated operating conditions with abutting neighbors.

Steve Twining, president of the council, says the museum got the group's enthusiastic support.

"I think it's a cultural treasure," he says. "We wouldn't be thrilled to have a museum on every block, but because of the precise situation and parking restrictions, I don't see it as a disruption. I didn't hear any objections."

"The irony to all this," Watson says, "is that this museum has got to be the most popular neighbor in this area. If you have a single-family estate next door, you can have any number of events, any number of visitors, any number of staff. Who wouldn't want a neighbor that doesn't have anything happening on weekends except for occasional events?"

The foundation is allowed to conduct weekend tours only one day a month and to hold a maximum of eight special events a year, six of which may run past 7 p.m. The number of visitors per day must not exceed 90 and daily on-site staff is limited to 20. Attendance at special events is capped at 150 guests except for one event each year that can have up to 250.

The regulations don't signify much change. They essentially formalize operating conditions that the foundation had imposed on itself, Watson says.

Carving out his niche

THE man who built the collection was the son of Russian immigrants. Born in Minneapolis in 1912, he moved to California as a child. Weisman was involved in dozens of business ventures but made the bulk of his fortune as head of Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributors.

He began collecting art in the 1950s with his first wife, Marcia Simon Weisman, the sister of industrialist Norton Simon, also a major collector. While Simon focused on French Impressionism, European Old Masters and Southeast Asian art, the Weismans concentrated on modern and contemporary works, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. The couple divorced in 1981 and divided the collection. Some works displayed at Weisman's house are among those he retained in the settlement, but most are later acquisitions.

Shopping independently in the 1980s and early '90s, Weisman bought with great enthusiasm. Known for making quick decisions and snapping up the work of emerging artists as well as that of established figures, he indulged his taste for bright colors, bold statements, illusionistic tricks and cheeky humor. A sober Picasso painting of a mother and child hangs over the fireplace in the living room, but a Pop painting of a bare foot with painted toenails by Tom Wesselmann occupies a similar place in the music room. A portrait of Billie Weisman by Beau Bradford is reflected in a sort of hall of mirrors in the master bathroom.

"Fred liked uplifting art," she says. "He liked the bright side of things."

The collector bought the Holmby Hills house — a 1920s creation of architect Gordon B. Kaufmann — in 1982 and spent about 10 years filling it with art. Weisman attempted to establish a museum for his collection at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills in the mid-1980s. But he gave up on the plan after months of negotiations and decided to turn his home into a museum that would operate in perpetuity.

The furniture — much of it upholstered with Weisman's favorite flowered chintz — remains in place, surrounded by art. The modern annex, designed by architect Frank Israel and completed in 1992, provides a sharp contrast in a high-ceilinged, wide-open space. The relatively sparse installation offers portraits of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol and massive box-like sculptures by Donald Judd. In the center of the room, a life-size sculpture of a biker in a black leather jacket by Hanson stands near two motorcycles decorated by Keith Haring.

"Fred took risks in business and art," Billie Weisman says. "He lost a few, but he won a lot."

LosAngelesBeauty

02-03-2007, 09:08 AM

http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2007-02/27712757.jpg
Jeff Koons "Train" work in progress. An operational replica of 1943 Baldwin 2900 class steam locomotive in stainless steel and aluminum, and Liebherr LR 1750 lattice boom crane 160' x 140'-6" x 29'-2" (c) Jeff Koons.
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

MUSEUM

LACMA considers train sculpture
Museum studies possibility of a 161-foot Jeff Koons work that would hang from a crane.
By Diane Haithman
Times Staff Writer

February 3, 2007

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is studying the feasibility of erecting a huge sculpture by Jeff Koons that would dangle a 70-foot fabricated train from the top of a 161-foot-tall crane on its Wilshire Boulevard campus.

The yet-to-be-created work, which would be visible for miles, would turn its wheels, whistle and belch steam three times a day.

Director Michael Govan, in conversation with Koons at a Thursday evening museum event, said LACMA had received a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to explore placing the work, to be called "Train," on its grounds after the museum's current remodel is finished.

In an interview afterward, Govan said the grant, awarded in summer 2006, was for more than $1 million.

Should the project go forward, he noted, it would take years and wouldn't be ready at the opening of LACMA's $60-million Broad Contemporary Art Museum, tentatively scheduled for February 2008.

A museum spokeswoman said the sculpture would be paid for by LACMA fundraising.

Koons said that placing the artwork at the center of the LACMA campus would create a sort of "town square for L.A.," with the train essentially serving the purpose of a small-town clock tower. He envisions the train going through its "performance" at noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Govan said he hoped the piece would become a new icon for the city, much like the Hollywood sign: "I have a fantasy that when kids see it they will drag their parents to the museum — not just literally but that it inspires that kind of curiosity."

He said the train whistle would create "no more noise than traffic."

Govan and Koons spoke as part of the museum's "Director's Series" of talks about art.

Also scheduled are discussions with Robert Irwin on March 8, and Diana Thater on April 12. For more information, go to www.lacma.org.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
diane.haithman@latimes.com

ocman

02-06-2007, 09:46 AM

The train crane will be seen from both the 10 freeway and downtown. It's going to be huge.

LosAngelesBeauty

02-08-2007, 08:37 AM

GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS

Streisand, 3 others named to LACMA board
MySpace head Chris DeWolfe, journalist Willow Bay and investor Anthony N. Pritzker are also added to museum group
By Lynne Heffley
Times Staff Writer

7:01 PM PST, February 7, 2007

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has added four high-profile members to its board of trustees: actress and recording artist Barbra Streisand, MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe, journalist Willow Bay and investor Anthony N. Pritzker, the museum announced late today.Since 2000, 27 new trustees have joined the museum's board, bringing the total to 53. Other recent additions include author and producer Michael Crichton, philanthropist and technology entrepreneur David Bohnett and Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive of Yahoo Inc.

"This is a truly remarkable time to be part of LACMA. I am certain that our new trustees agree and will bring an added level of experience and engagement to the museum's transformation," board chairwoman Nancy Daly Riordan said in a statement.

Michael Govan, the museum's director, stated, "This new group of trustees will bring even more diversity of experience and community interests to the leadership of our continuing transformation of the museum."

Streisand, a supporter of humanitarian and environmental causes and a funder of the Clinton Climate Change Initiative, collected German Expressionist art by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Emil Nolde as a young art enthusiast, the museum said. More recently, she has acquired works by John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, William McGregor Paxton and others. Two pieces from her collection, Edward Hopper's "Summer in the City" and Thomas Hart's "Haying," were on long-term display in LACMA's American Art galleries.

Pritzker is a co-founder of the Pritzker Group. Since September 2004, he has served as chairman of AmSafe Partners. DeWolfe is the co-founder of MySpace.com, the social networking Web venue.

Bay, who collects photography, is a freelance anchor and reporter for MSNBC and NBC News. She was anchor for CNN's "Moneyline News Hour" and co-anchored ABC's "Good Morning America Sunday."

The new trustees join the board amid a major effort to expand and upgrade the museum's facilities. A new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, funded by trustee Eli Broad, is under construction, and plans call for extensive renovation of existing buildings.

lynne.heffley@latimes.com

LosAngelesBeauty

02-08-2007, 08:39 AM

^ much much needed renovation since LACMA doesn't come off one bit as having a prestigious campus. It looks unkept and disorganized. I heard that they're getting rid of the Ahmanson as part of the exhibition space, and will become administrative.

I wonder how extensive will the renovation to the other wings be? Anyone have contacts into LACMA? Provide some insights? Much appreciated!

LosAngelesBeauty

02-16-2007, 10:01 AM

MUSEUMS

http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2007-02/27938482.jpg

Bowers' new space conquest
Chinese art from several millenniums and photographs by Ansel Adams inaugurate a wing at the Santa Ana museum.
By Scarlet Cheng
Special to The Times

February 16, 2007

Seven years ago, Anne Shih was visiting the Shanghai Museum, a stronghold of Chinese art and antiquities, when she tossed out a suggestion to Director Chen Xiejun: What about an exhibition loan to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, where Shih is a board member? All right, she remembers Chen saying, if you can build a new space to house the show, we'll arrange it.

Today, not only is that new space built — 30,000 square feet at a cost of $15 million — but "Treasures From Shanghai: 5000 Years of Chinese Art and Culture" highlights its opening Sunday, the first day of the Chinese new year. A photography exhibition, "Ansel Adams: Classic Images," inaugurates a second gallery in the new wing.

On Main Street in Santa Ana, the Dorothy and Donald Kennedy wing spans half a block in glass, metal accents and a cladding of troweled plaster painted to match the existing architecture. The city opened the original Spanish-style museum in 1936 to feature Orange County history. In 1992, the Bowers reopened after an extensive remodeling that greatly expanded the facility, and it broadened its mission to showing a wide variety of art and artifacts. Bowers President Peter C. Keller pushed for the latest expansion, both to gain more exhibition space and to improve existing facilities. To pay for it, the museum obtained $4 million in state funding, with most of the remainder coming from private sources, including $2 million from benefactors Dorothy and Donald Kennedy. The latter is First American Corp. chairman emeritus and chairman of the Bowers' board of governors.

As of Sunday, museum admission, except for students, seniors and children younger than 5, will become uniformly $17 on weekdays and $19 on weekends — eliminating a general admission fee of $5. The latter was only for viewing a few permanent collections anyway, says Keller. "We're trying to simplify matters," he adds.

The new wing was designed by Robert R. Coffee Architect + Associates of Newport Beach. "We wanted to use materials that were compatible and more or less carried forward what was done in the past," Coffee said during a walk-through of the space last week as workers were still adding display cases and other finishing touches. "There was an effort to give an updated image, that we're moving into a new century and the museum is making a great transition."

Changing entrance

Formerly, visitors entered the museum via a courtyard off a side street. Today, a steel and glass canopy announces the new entrance on Main Street, and several apertures signal the museum's contents to passersby. Art and artifacts can be glimpsed through the glass wall that flanks the long corridor leading from entry foyer to the new wing. Farther along, an outcropped display window exhibits an elaborately carved wooden sarcophagus from 19th century Indonesia.

At the end of the corridor is a central atrium — a lofty 6,000 square feet that can be used for exhibitions as well as dinners and presentations — and beyond that is an enclosed garden with wall-mounted fountains. Radiating off the atrium are two new galleries, which provide an additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, and an acoustically balanced auditorium with 300 seats. Mahogany floors — "from certified sustainable sources," Coffee said — were selected for their durability and warmth of tone in an otherwise crisp, minimalist interior.

Developing relationship

Chen Kelun, assistant director of the Shanghai Museum and curator of the Chinese exhibition, says his museum's relationship with the Bowers has been developing since 2000. Speaking by telephone recently from Shanghai, he mentioned an exchange program in which the Bowers sends Orange County high school students to visit the Shanghai Museum as part of their docent training.

Although the Shanghai Museum has often sent works to group shows — including the Guggenheim Museum's blockbuster "China: 5,000 Years" in 1998 — it has not had a solo show, so to speak, in the continental U.S. since the late '80s, when an exhibition titled "The Chinese Scholar's Studio" made several U.S. stops.

In 2002, the museum signed the agreement for the Bowers exhibition, in exchange for which the Santa Ana museum pays a fee. After the Shanghai show concludes, Chen Kelun will curate a permanent exhibition of Chinese art for the same space, but from the Bowers' own collection. (The Bowers also has an agreement with the British Museum to share expenses and income from shows from that London institution. "Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt," on view through Dec. 31, is part of that arrangement.)

The other new gallery will be used for rotating exhibitions. It launches with 75 Adams images that the noted photographer selected toward the end of his life and dubbed "The Museum Set." These are later prints of some of the dramatic landscapes that made him famous, including scenes from Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. In contrast to earlier prints, which had a softer look, "the more recent prints are less timid," Adams, who died in 1984, said. "I have sharply different vision now. The results are, perhaps, more dramatic." The collection is on loan from the Capital Group Foundation.

Chen Kelun said selecting the works for the Shanghai show wasn't difficult: "We got a brief from the Bowers — after all, they know what American audiences enjoy seeing — and then we went over the list together." The theme was art and culture in China over 5,000 years, "so we used these objects — bronze, ceramics, handicrafts, painting and calligraphy — to tell that story. Among Chinese museum collections, these are the areas we're quite strong in."

Shapes and eras

With the help of staff experts, he selected 77 sets of objects that represent historical eras as well as present a variety of shapes, patterns and sizes. "To have an art exhibition," he said, "we have to consider how the objects would display together."

Many prized and unusual objects were shipped, including Neolithic pottery and jade, bronze vessels from the Xia (18th to 16th century BC) to the early Han (206 BC to 8 AD) dynasties, ceramics from the Tang (618 to 907 AD) through the Ming (1368 to 1644 AD) dynasties, and a small sampling of paintings and calligraphy from the Ming and the Qing (1644 to 1911 AD) dynasties.

"The Bowers thought their audiences would be more interested in objects than in paintings and calligraphy," said Zhou Yanqun, a Shanghai Museum staff member in Santa Ana to install the show. To that end, two dozen exquisitely worked bronze pieces, dating back 2,000 to 4,000 years, are included. There is a complete set of bronze bells from the Early Spring and Autumn period (the 8th to the 7th century BC). They hang in descending order from a wooden beam and still produce pleasing tones, as Zhou Ya, the Shanghai Museum's curator of bronze, demonstrated. "Each bell was designed to play two notes," he said, striking one on two surfaces with his knuckles.

Elsewhere, a wine vessel dating from the same period is unusual for its prominent dragon-shaped handles. "This piece is extremely rare," said Chen Kelun. "It's quite large, so it's a wine server — wine would be put into it and ladled out." He adds that many of these ancient pieces are in such good condition because they were burial objects. The ancient Chinese believed in an afterlife, he said, "so they prepared for themselves the things they would need to have in the next world."

Kinds of appeal

Even works on paper were selected as much for their popular as for their art historical appeal. The two hanging calligraphy scrolls feature a free-flowing style one can admire for its energetic strokes without being able to read the characters.

A hand scroll depicting palace life in the Tang dynasty (but painted during the Ming) is unfurled to unveil an unusual but strangely familiar subject: Court ladies in diaphanous robes are shown swinging what look very much like golf clubs to get a little ball into a little hole in the ground. Apparently, Tang ladies had both the leisure and the freedom to indulge in the sporting life.

While discussing the dragon-handled wine vessels, Chen Kelun interjected a bit of contemporary history.

"Can I tell you an interesting little sidebar?" he asked. "There's a pair of these vessels — the other one is here at our museum. At the end of the 1960s, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, these objects were considered garbage from feudal times, so they were often sent to the scrap heap."

Fortunately, museum workers managed to salvage the body of the vessels, although they realized from the broken edges that the "ears" — the handles — were missing. Two years later, they found four dragon-shaped pieces from the same scrap heap. When they placed them onto the sides of the vessels, it was a perfect fit.

And what is the official opinion today of these objects from China's feudal past?

"Oh, now they're treasures!" Chen said with a small laugh.

*

'Treasures From Shanghai' and 'Ansel Adams: Classic Images'

Where: Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; closed Mondays.

Ends: Aug. 19 for "Treasures From Shanghai"; May 13 for "Ansel Adams"

Price: $12 to $19; children younger than 5 free

Contact: (714) 567-3600; www.bowers.org