Quote of the Day: Mark Krotov
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| Sandow Birk, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (after Ed Ruscha), 2022 |
"There's something beautifully provincial about the 'County' in the museum’s name, evocative of dirt roads and movie ranches, as if the Louvre could ever be called the Paris County Museum."
Comments
The Inner Borough Museum?
The New York County Museum?
The Fifth [County]? [The Frick would not be amused.]
> the “County” in the museum’s name...
LOL. I recall years ago joking with a person about the sound of "county" as compared with a word like "metropolitan." It reminds me of the way that the names of most towns and districts in England have a quaint or charming sound about them----at least compared with something like "Bellflower," "Fullerton," "Lynwood" or "Compton."
As for the Louvre, because it's so massive and crammed with so many things for the visitor to browse through, it to me is "Louvre World" in Orlando, France (or Paris, Florida).
> For true stupidity I recommend a visit to Frank
> Gehry’s own Walt Disney Concert Hall....the metal
> panels that make up the building’s whooshing façade
> looked exciting, adventurous, untamed; at street
> level they are simply dumb, too big and too vague.
> ...Really it [the Bilbao effect] was the Sydney effect,
> the difference being that Sydney’s 1957–1973 Opera
> House...is a good opera house and a magnificently
> humane and urbane civic space. The Guggenheim Bilbao,
> by contrast, is awkward to show art in and is a mean
> neighbor to its neighborhood. Like the Walt Disney
> Concert Hall made closely in its image, Bilbao was
> as stately, establishmentarian, pious, ponderous, and
> instantly obsolete as the hipster artists of 1965
> mistakenly thought the then-new LACMA was.
What the writer says about the museum in Spain or the concert hall in LA pretty much can be said about the building in Sydney. Or visa versa. As for "good opera house," I don't believe it has been considered a truly successful space for music, no more than what the writer claims is a lack of same for the Guggenheim Bilbao for art.
However, the article's co-author, Thomas de Monchaux, regrettably is probably on-target about the Geffen/Zumthor building:
> Opening circa 2025 will be the worst building by
> one of the world’s formerly finest designers
De Monchaux contradicts himself from piece to piece.
He's said this about the Pompidou Center:
"Construction sites, all scaffolding and cranes and trucks, tend to be more interesting places than the buildings they eventually yield."
This is a fitting description of the new LACMA. It's a modern ruin.
Like the Pompidou Center, which de Monchaux admires, the new LACMA also was meant "to weave the democratic spontaneity of [...] the town squares into the fabric of the city." LACMA does that by creating a village of galleries within the building and surrounding them with a glassed-in promenade (terrace galleries) which give a 360 degree view of the city. At the Pompidou, the view was not nearly that pluralistic.
This architectural endeavor has classical antecedents in the Parthenon friezes, which depict a Panathenaic procession. At LACMA, we will get the live-acton version.
Further reading: https://www.thecollector.com/parthenon-frieze/
--- J. Garcin
It shows the Hope Athena.
Curiously, gods and mortals will also mingle on the LACMA "frieze".
--- J. Garcin
The Sydney Opera house recently went through a renovation so the acoustics are now vastly improved, although up until this point it was known to be horrible space to hear music. With Disney Hall, I'll also disagree with the writer. The building works better at street level. It's Gehry's most coherent work, and it's the perfect size for an acoustic space, even on the smaller side than many. As a sculptural object, it's also his most conventionally beautiful. Not as abstract to me as his other works.
It's got its flaws, mainly the distracting second building for the offices and some blank, unengaging sides facing the less active streets. The flaws are similar to Sydney. I'm not a fan of its corporate-like podium the beautiful "sails" sit on. I also find Disney Hall to be the more "humane" of the two. The interior space of Disney are more intimate, more playful and optimistic. Doesn't take itself too seriously judging by Gehry's knowing choice of the kitschy carpet simply because Mrs. Disney liked flowers. A choice that a lot of people didn't get.
However, opinions based on personal taste are one thing. So what smells like roses to one person smells like dung to another. But opinions that dismiss basic reality, engineering principles or fundamental math-accounting are a different matter.
Mark Krotov's reaction to the way a building looks is very subjective and perfectly fine. But there are technical aspects of a Sydney Opera House, Guggenheim Bilbao or Disney Concert Hall that go way beyond the purely creative. So if Krotov is aware of long publicized aspects of Jorn Utson's building of 1973, he should know there are technical flaws with it.
As for Peter Zumthor's building for LACMA, disregard the pros and cons of its artistic-creative side. For one thing, it's squeezing the budget of the museum, which has never enjoyed a Harvard or Met-size endowment fund to begin with. It also contains less square footage than the buildings torn down to make way for it. In terms of all the floor-to-ceiling windows of its perimeter, while they may be enjoyable from a TikTok/Instagram standpoint, they will very much affect the way that art objects are displayed. Or not displayed.
But the authors are so unfriendly, bitter, and cynical that it undermines any argument they make.
Honestly, as punishment, they should be forced to listen to themselves:
"To suggest that anything could be recorded with no moral is of course itself a moral statement. By which I mean an immoral one."