Category: visual

“There’s no artist or movement here that hasn’t already had abundant exposure in museums and galleries over the years, if not the decades. As a result, whatever the Broad collection may say about the art of the recent past, the real story it tells is about art collecting in our time.”

“When it opens on September 20, the Broad will become the city’s second richest museum behind the Getty—its endowment of $200 million is more than the endowments of the neighboring Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—as well as the latest edition to the developing downtown arts district. Commissioned by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife Edythe, the $140 million museum will showcase and store the couple’s more than 2,000-piece collection.”

Making a museum of the Japanese sculptor’s old studio on the island of Shikoku has proven to be a long, complicated matter, with challenging issues concerning the ownership of the artwork, the buildings and the land on which they sit.

“The volume of work chosen for the inaugural exhibition, on both the third floor and a smaller first-floor gallery that will eventually be used for temporary shows, is overwhelming. Partition walls clutter the third floor, and obliterate its spatial drama. And too many of the works are so large, and importune the visitor so aggressively, that one feels hectored by hectares of art.”

“We are one of the best things that’s ever happened to MOCA. Why? We have a marketing budget. We are going to bring people to both museums. Admission is free at the Broad, and there will be exciting things happening. MOCA is going to benefit from all this.”

“The Broad is a hybrid. It is one part art museum, with an as-yet undefined program of changing exhibitions and a sizable permanent collection … It’s also one part lending library, with a mandate to circulate its holdings far and wide in the U.S. and abroad” – the first museum to have lending explicitly written into its mandate. But Christopher Knight has doubts about how this will work out in practice.

The agency does not intend to sell paintings or sculpture; rather, it wants to broker deals like the one that resulted in a nine-minute Kanye West-Steve McQueen video screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July.

“At a time when he can cherry-pick his projects, Gehry has chosen Watts. And in Children’s Institute Inc. he has found an interesting client. Founded in 1906 by a female probation officer, the organization began life in Los Angeles as the Big Sister League to help young women in crisis (namely, those who were unmarried and pregnant).”

“The very definition of collecting, in a time of speculative buying, is now up for grabs. Shouldn’t these changes radically alter the old museum model, loosen it up, make it more experimental, shift its identity from locked treasure house to clearinghouse for fresh ideas?”

“Any curator will tell you that it takes time to learn a new building’s personality quirks — to figure out how best to configure temporary walls, take advantage of sight lines that let art pull a visitor through the galleries and calibrate an installation so that objects visually speak to one another. The Broad’s inaugural installation began only in June. That’s quick. Three visits over that relatively brief period revealed a work in evolutionary progress, with many changes along the way. Some may yet come before doors open to a curious public next week.”