Qatar Gets Naming Op at Geffen
LACMA has begun naming the Geffen's core galleries for donors. One name stands out: Qatar. The oil-rich Persian Gulf nation is sponsoring a room of Western U.S. landscapes from Albert Bierstadt and Ansel Adams to Richard Prince and Wendy Red Star ("Picturing the American West").
Qatar has had an official relationship with LACMA since 2019, when LACMA, the Qatar Museums, and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, announced a deal to collaborate on exhibitions. Last year Qatar made the news when it gave the U.S. a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 for use as Air Force One. This was seen as an especially blatant attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration.
Why slap Qatar's name on American art, rather than on one of the Geffen's excellent rooms of Islamic art? I'm left wondering whether the political climate played a role, even at this remove from DC. To the MAGA mindset, Islamic art codes as alien and suspect, while "cowboy art" is OK.
If so, the irony is that "Picturing the West" centers the dark side of American history that Trump is expunging from the Smithsonian and national parks. There's Richard Prince's deconstructions of the cowboy mythos; a Ken Gonzales-Day lynching tree; Wendy Red Star's trolling of the Western gaze.
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| Installation view, "Picturing the American West" |
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| Wendy Red Star, Fall, 2006. LACMA, gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D. |
Comments
Although if a tourist is visiting LA, although I won't cringe as much if they decide to drop by LACMA 2026, I'm still not more confident they won't have a reaction of, "my own city's art museum is better."
Opinions of the Geffen (re: its looks, format, non-traditional style) very easily follow along the lines of, "beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder" and the "Emperor's new clothes." So LACMA's must-see quality, even decades after 1965, remains somewhat ambiguous.
This comes per the Met on Prince:
"In the mid-1970s Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.
"'Untitled (Cowboy)' is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, "Untitled (Cowboy)" is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience."
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I wonder whether the typical museum visitor will read it that way.
I'd like to give Govan and his staffers the benefit of the doubt in making sure all the benefactors of the buildings bulldozed are recognized too. After all, contributors are contributors, donations are donations, regardless of the year. But confidence in the professionalism of LACMA regrettably can never be too strong.
Oh, well, we is rubes.