Quote of the Day: Carolina A. Miranda
"When architect Yoshio Taniguchi designed an expansion for New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the early aughts, he famously told the trustees that if they raised enough money, 'I’ll make the architecture disappear.' Zumthor’s galleries will follow you home and haunt you."
Comments
I find myself now hoping that a reviewer really likes the Geffen/Zumthor/Govan building. But, hey, opinions are like the proverbial butthole. Everyone has one and they all stink. lol.
G. Garcin has implied that unless an observer really likes the Geffen, he or she must be a [quote, unquote] rube. Since critiques of almost anything almost always range from good to negative, plenty of people must be rubes.
A LACMAonfire blog entry a few years ago referred to the 1965-1986 LACMA in non-complimentary terms. At the time, I felt defensive about that viewpoint. That's in spite of knowing for a long time the Pereira-1986 buildings weren't praised. But since they reflected the support of hundreds of major donors, including the Ahmansons, Hammers, Bings, etc, those buildings - good or bad - symbolized a thumbs up.
I wonder what the details of the early 1960s were when Richard Brown presumably worked with William Pereira in creating an art museum, something which most other American cities had already done. Since Brown favored Mies van der Rohe, I had the vague (and probably very wrong) impression the former director therefore never tweaked whatever designs came out of Pereira's studio.
When Brown was terminated by LACMA's board not long after 1965, I now wonder if that was because a lot of people overseeing the museum were unhappy about his work with Pereira. There were basic flaws in Pereira's blueprints that even people not into the look/format of early 1900's Beaux-Arts buildings (eg, Richard Brown?) should have been able to detect.
The 1965 buildings forced LACMA into the wrong direction for decades, That caused money to be wasted on renovations and add-ons in the early 1980s and then in 1986. Govan spent (and also regrettably wasted) money on modifying the 1965-1986 campus, including installing a new staircase in the Ahmanson Gallery.
Then there were waste of funds on projects like this:
https://lacmaonfire.blogspot.com/2008/07/lacma-opens-latin-american-galleries.html
> Is LACMA curator Virginia
> Fields speechless over
> Jorge Pardo's redesign of
> the Arts of Ancient America
> rooms?
^ That alone made me want to see the Art of Americas building torn down. Actually, in 2020 I still felt a slash-and-burn approach to the older campus was too extreme. Again, that was due to caution about LACMA's budget, a respect for the museum's donors since 1965, and a "waste not, want not" outlook.
I also didn't realize what museums like the one in Houston with its Moneo-designed galleries of 2020 had managed to create, much less what many cities (both large and small) throughout the US had built in the early 1900s.
Mea culpa.
Yet, here she is, bloviating about things she does not understand.
She's a hack.
--- J. Garcin.
No, she's a rube. lmao.
tomteicholz.substack. com:
Before the demolition of the former William Perreira campus and its buildings, LACMA had a long wall that listed donors to the museum. It was not a list of the super-rich (although there were some) but rather included hard working long time residents of Los Angeles who believed in Los Angeles having a major art museum.
It included names you might recognize such as Harvey Mudd, and others you wouldn’t such as my brother-in-law’s parents, Sam and Frances Myman. That wall is gone. I do sincerely hope that it will either return or that a new locus will be found that lists and remembers those donors. Erasing them is a grievous mistake.
Then we could have created a serviceable venue to display one of the world's greatest art collections. Right now, it's little better than an E.R. waiting room.
After the DS+R renovation, the only thing that still bothers me is the atrium off the lobby. Don't know why Diller did not warm that space up with wood, paint, etc.
--- J. Garcin
[LACMA] has always been a museum on its own terms. Housed in what felt like a ramshackle architectural hodgepodge of period buildings built around an outdoor plaza, its fascinating collections belied the setting…. …LACMA felt messy, disjointed… comfy. That very much suited the personalities of the city it’s in, a sprawling megalopolis that resists being reduced to any single label.
Reaction has been sharp. The building has been called a triumph, a bunker, a curvaceous concrete sandwich, a cringey sculpture, and an experience that is “rule-bending, alive, disorienting, ambitious.”
Love it or hate it, this is a museum I suspect, that will provoke many more debates than it will ever answer. All of these reactions are correct in their own way.
The physical building is, in its own terms, remarkable. The concrete does something I did not expect: it recedes. It exerts a pure physical presence…then it shuts up and lets the art be whatever it is. It does not fuss. It does not frame. It does not editorialize. The art looks gorgeous against the concrete, and because it’s been given room to breathe, it invites you to contemplate it on its own terms.
But the natural light is both protagonist and problem. Reflections on glass. Glare on paint. Mark Lamster at the Dallas Morning News called out the “serious glare and silhouetting problems,” and he is not wrong.
On the other hand, I can imagine visiting at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and having two completely different experiences. So is this a feature or a bug? I’m not entirely sure.
The other problem with the light is the contrast between “outside” galleries and “inside.” ….Arranged in the interior are 27 concrete “boxes” which are smaller galleries. These are oddly unpleasant spaces by contrast with the flowing larger “outside” galleries… they are dimly lit so your eyes have to adapt from the larger daylight spaces. And…they seem like cramped prisons for the art.
…there is a series of tables in the middle of the rooms, with objects just sitting there, as if they’d been laid out in a jewelers shop. This is both strangely unsettling but also incredibly intimate. You approach the object the way you would approach something on a sideboard in a collector’s living room. No vitrine, no stanchion. You worry, briefly, for it. You get over it — the things are firmly anchored — and you are closer to them than traditional museum convention.
Art is a vocabulary… How do you know a work is audacious if you don’t know what it’s being audacious against? How do you know a painting is a rebellion without a tradition behind it? Or that this or that innovation made everything after it (which to modern eyes looks commonplace) a different conversation?
So I have to admit to a complicated set of reactions. Because the other thing the Geffen galleries do is let you look at physical objects as physical objects… Just as things made by people. The concrete frames without imposing. The light is generous. The absence of vitrines is incredibly cool.
The white cube gallery was modernism’s insistence that art speak for itself. But it was invented for audiences who already spoke the vocabulary. It assumed the context was already in the viewer’s head. Geffen revives this for audiences who may not carry that context. Whether that is a brilliant adaptation…or just plain incoherence, is the open question of the building.
We disagree.
That's why New Yorkers don't go.
Do you collect art?
--- J. Garcin
> an E.R. waiting
> room.
If New Yorkers, as you characterize them, don't go to the following, it's because Manhattan on 53rd St, between 5th & 6th Ave is a so-called clusterf**k of tourists, traffic and people in general..
https://youtu.be/E1smDvQn1DE?si=a5DT-LrgfGO_enKs
If a museum has a great collection but a so-so presentation, or a so-so collection but a great presentation, that's better than a museum with a so-so collection and a so-so presentation.
LACMA for decades, due in part to 1965-1986, has been caught in sort of a rut of the 3rd category.
New Yorkers all flocked there, sort of spellbound that we could see everything, in virtual silence.
I remember saying out loud, to no one in particular, "What a treat!!" Others responded that they hadn't seen "Starry" in 20 years because the place was so horrible.
I went back, I think, 20 times in just a couple months, to really study the collection.
I buy my MoMA membership, still, only because I buy all my wedding presents at MoMA Design across the street, and buying membership gives me 20% at various times throughout the year. But going to see art is a chore.
No other museums evoke "chore" quite like MoMA. We hate it.
Non-starter. I'd have to ply my trade on Eighth Avenue to afford a $1,500. ante to get private tours.
Any road, I sated my long thirst for civilized exposure back in 2020, when the place was quiet as the grave.
The MOMA photography collection is at an atmospheric level of greatness.
The critical consensus is broadly positive — with one big asterisk, related to the intersection of sunshine and art.
At the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman calls Zumthor’s building “by turns uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious.” Christopher Hawthorne, at Punch List, writes that it has “succeeded—really succeeded, I think—in making sense of L.A.’s polyglot, polycentric urban form and eternally slippery civic identity.”
Paul Goldberger, in Air Mail, says that “this is a meandering building, and it makes you want to meander within it.” Michael J. Lewis, calling it “a work of furious originality” in the Wall Street Journal, says that “never before has a California museum so completely captured the state’s carefree affect.”
One adjective that comes up a lot is “messy.” The concrete is splotchy and stained — “I love this kind of rawness,” Zumthor says — and will become splotchier over time as the holes drilled to hang works on raw concrete get patched with each rehang.
Hyperallergic’s Matt Stromberg calls the hang “messy, contested, and at times revelatory.” Now to that asterisk: The biggest problem with the building is that many works are placed directly in front of windows. “All that daylight makes anything covered in glass difficult to make out,” writes Miranda. And “while a lot of the collection looks great,” says Hawthorne, “a lot of it looks terrible, or is overmatched by the architecture.”
What’s clear is that the experience of seeing art there is an unpredictable journey. Zumthor’s “labyrinthine arrangement of liminal spaces” has created a museum “in which it is easy and useful to get lost,” says the NYT’s Kimmelman. [End quote]
Critics in the media are known to give good marks to something the public doesn't care for and visa versa. Things I don't like are popular with lots of other people and visa versa.
To me, nothing makes a museum more unimpressive than when it gives the impression of not having enough in its collection to display. At the same time, I was in more denial (or wanted to give a shrug of futility) about how the substandard of LACMA's former campus than I care to admit to.
However, my modus operandi is to not live beyond one's means (LACMA has never had a large enough budget). By contrast, various other people don't mind running up a large balance on their credit card.
I give props to Govan, etc, for trying to upgrade LACMA, but aspects of it still do come off like a regional museum----eg, the LA Times' former art critic correctly complaining about its exhibition schedules, the museum's social media, the lack of Met-caliber scholarship, etc).
> no tourists
Places can become too much, too much. Or the Louvre effect: too many visitors and too much stuff. But nothing worse than places (including museums) with so-so quality and a so-so (or dead-mall) atmosphere.
https://youtu.be/i-21zBMu27k?si=4Mg0EeUqF0PXD94a
But after visiting the Simon Museum awhile ago, there were sections of even that compact-sized place that still did give me a sense of a "little going a long way."
However, certain museums are a must-see, mainly because their collections are clearly first-rate. Just about all of them also look old-time regal and traditional. Although not wanting the following criteria to be judged as a good thing, they're admittedly also not necessarily TikTok or Instagram friendly.
All the windows of the Geffen will be a distraction for visitors who aren't devotees or connoisseurs of art-art, art-history, art-scholarship. And the potpourri layout of the space will cater to visitors not wanting to be surrounded by one type or one style of art objects for too long.
The dry cleaning bill must be "through the roof." Haar.
When I lived in NY, I would pop in from time to time to see Demoiselles, Red Studio, and Map (Johns), my favorite paintings in MoMA's collection.
Avoided Starry Night. It is a painting for tourists.
MoMA has always been a very popular museum. When I was in college, I would try to make it to NY before it opened for the day. There would be a large crowd waiting for it to open.
There is no LA museum with that kind of draw. Of course, there is no LA museum with the masterpiece density of MoMA.
--- J. Garcin
> that cotton-candy pink
> polyester.
Speaking of which, the new building is going to force up the yearly maintenance budget.
Unlike most public-commercial properties, museums don't have to spend too much on window cleaning. But not the Geffen. Lots of windows to deal with. And if maintenance crews don't do that enough, the place will come off as even more "messy."
The Geffen has also required LACMA rent space off-campus for offices, library, storage, a conservation center.
I read the donor of the Goff building, Joe Price, several years ago got annoyed at the museum when it re-allocated some space in the Japanese galleries for a conservation lab.
I sense that Govan is the type who on key occasions lacks the best bedside manner or enough common sense. The fact the benefactors of the 1965-1986 buildings aren't honored in the current iteration will make them or their successors feel, "what am I, chopped liver?"
If Govan were on the ball (if only to help with current and future fundraising efforts---donors don't to be acknowledged then ignored) he'd have made sure everyone who has donated a lot of time and money to the museum since before and after 1965 received honorable mention.
Yes. There's a lot of fail safes in New York to counter even a mighty MoMA. But I never discount "Starry" when I'm there to give me a jolt of life. I don't find it cheesy at all.
I admire the Rothkos and the Pollocks and Duchamps. And Meret Oppenheim's furry cup and saucer and spoon, oh, my!
danuta.drozdowicz, Instagram:
1. I am concerned about the acoustics - your tape sounded continuously loud... 2. The unrelenting gray concrete was, well, unrelenting. The galleries with colored concrete were a relief but also a reminder of how unrelenting the rest of the walls were. 3. Too much empty wall and plaza space, but perhaps they are still placing art. [End quote]
Some of the ghost of Pereira-1965 is haunting Zumthor-2026.
I spoke with someone who visited the Geffen last week. Her main impression of it was the collection seemed sparse or limited---no mention of too much gray concrete, however. She also thought the building was smaller than she originally felt it would be.
But everyone has a different take on things. Certain museums are rated from A+ to B ("great collection, great presentation!"). Other museums generate [insert complaint C or D here] to "better luck next time."
Govan and his staff during the next several months had better do some adjusting and fine-tuning.
As for the legacy of Richard Brown and William Pereira (then Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer), they regrettably caused LACMA for years to spend (and waste) millions of dollars:
https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/transformationf.pdf