Today in Chartjunk
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| Graphic from "Los Angeles museums on the cusp of a new golden age," The Art Newspaper, Feb. 26, 2026 |
Edward Tufte made a career railing against this kind of pop infographic. Not only does The Art Newspaper's chart perpetuate a stale stereotype (Los Angeles = palm trees!) but it distorts and obscures data behind an irrelevant picture.
Wrote Tufte: "The use of two (or three) varying dimensions to show one-dimensional data is a weak and inefficient technique… The number of information-carrying (variable) dimensions depicted should not exceed the number dimensions in the data."
Below, Tufte's most famous example of what a chart should not be ("chartjunk").
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| Nigel Holmes, chart for Time magazine |
Comments
> architecture critic Christopher
> Hawthorne described the
> expansion as “bold and
> compromised in nearly equal
> measure...
That likely will best sum up the Geffen Galleries.
Pereira'a/Hardy-Holzman-Pfeiffer's buildings were not major league (saying "Count-y Museum" with a Southern twang wasn't without reason), but Zumthor's building will have other kinds of weaknesses. I guess that's just in the DNA of LACMA.
However, programming affects the museum too. Govan and his people inserting so much contemporary art into the various galleries makes LACMA come off as even more rinky-dink.
> “Two of them are vanity
> projects, and I don’t care,”
> Thater says bluntly.
Although both Dataland and the Lucas Museum will be too much like amusement parks or another version of the AMPAS museum, better to have them than not.
I recall when Los Angeles was mainly LACMA on Wilshire Blvd and the Huntington in San Marino ("Pasadena")----with the Simon (more "Pasadena" than "Los Angeles" too) pulling up the rear. Slim pickings, folks.
Before 1965, LA not even having a separate public art museum compared with what had long been in a city like Minneapolis, etc, etc, was the epitome of arrested development.
So the Simon Museum in Pasadena certainly hasn't been seen by various people as necessarily a part of "Los Angeles."
As for the symbol of the palm tree, not sure if it's either fitting or ironic (or both) that many of the new trees planted around the Geffen Galleries building (located in "Los Angeles") happen to be palm trees.
Based on that premise, a similar argument could be made about the Brooklyn Museum not being seen by various people as necessarily a part of "New York."
Jeez, I certainly hope LA's locals don't see it like that.
Tourists to New York might discount Brooklyn, but locals go, especially art lovers, of which there are many.
To my mind, Norton Simon is the alpha and the omega in "LA."
I came across an old magazine article from the 1970s that reviewed the art museums of "Southern California." The now-Simon museum at the time was still the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM) and devoted to mainly contemporary art. The article had a sentence about the building designed by the Pasadena-based firm of Ladd and Kelsey. The story had a sentence joking about the building being shaped like an "H" and "they didn't know what in the H they were doing."
The overseers of the PAM (struggling with a lot of red ink) soon thereafter turned it and its collection over to Norton Simon. Although the museum's contents were mainly contemporary it also included...
The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection, featuring over 450 works by Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, is permanently housed at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. [End quote]
I notice the Simon right now has a special exhibition titled "Impressions of Galka Scheyer."
If Michael Govan were managing the Simon museum, he might shove a lot of that out and insert in its place way too much contemporary art. I don't know how sarcastic my comment is or isn't.