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

[bjornson]

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]

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]

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/mercu...a/15836211.htm

[bjornson]

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]

I've uploaded some photos from my visit to the Broad Art Center here http://www.flickr.com/photos/funhaus...7594346811951/

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Originally Posted by bjornson

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.

Anyone going to the Nov 18 dinner? lol

[edluva]

Originally Posted by LosAngelesBeauty

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]

How is Maricopa County up there?

[bjornson]

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]

--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.


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?' "


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

[Quixote]

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]

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]

Originally Posted by Westsidelife

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]

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]

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

[ocman]

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]

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.



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]

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/archi...1.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]

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]

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.