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.
Out of context (not with his fellow "Pictures Generation" peers), the typical museum visitor might mistake the Prince's allegory/irony for realism.
--- J. Garcin
LACMA has been transmorphed from a museum of art to a museum anti-art. The “David Geffen Galleries’” walls, and space itself, are dull and dark and devoid of inspiration displaying very little or no art at all. The construction of the new building itself is slapdash and unpolished. Its major donors are recognized with their names etched onto on cracked and splotchy walls accompanied by waste bins...
winterpollan, Instagram:
All the charm of a parking garage.
katherinetolford, Instagram:
The views are great. I visited the galleries with and without the art. I was hoping I would feel differently with the art installed. I didn’t. It has a dark oppressive vibe that doesn’t make me want to linger and savor the art... [End quote]
^ Not sure if that account belongs to the Save-LACMA-mob/MAGA crowd that J. Garcin has referred to, but it does includes images of all the blank wall spaces in the Geffen. The installation convinces me that LACMA's staff, including Michael Govan, has a very mediocre sense of both aesthetics and the need to have as much of the museum's collection on display as possible.
Incidentally, I don't post to Instagram, don't have an Instagram account and don't find it an interesting form of social media. I've only started clicking on links to it, however, because of a curiosity about comments regarding the Geffen Galleries---so don't assume the above posted opinions are from me pretending to be someone else.
I also think Govan/Zumthor/Geffen is better than Brown/Pereira/Ahmanson (so the Save-LACMA-mob crowd regrettably were "rubes"), but that's not exactly a high bar to reach and surpass.
Someone instead should have used idjit.
The new David Geffen Musuem at LACMA is the Best Musuem in LA now. Hands down
brendannorth, threads:
It’s amazing. I’m a huge fan of it. It’s not better than the Getty. And it might soon be surpassed by the Lucas Museum this fall. We are incredibly lucky to have so many world class museums in our city.
busylivingbusydyingup2u
Better than the Getty? Hmmmm……I don’t know about that one. And I must admit, the new LACMA is absolutely stunning but I wouldn’t say it’s better than the Getty. But, let’s hold off crowning a new Queen until we see the Lucas Museum in a few months. [End quote]
^ Their provincialism reminds me of my own lack of awareness about LACMA until well after 2020. Although its budget and history had long made me perceive a knock-down-rebuild formula as too extreme, I also didn't realize just how bad the 1965-1986 campus really was.
But this blog has helped me go through all the ins and outs, particularly when set against what exists in other cities. Which is why the Geffen Galleries are continuing the same pattern first started by Richard Brown and William Pereira in 1965.
I wish Michael Govan and his staffers were more astute and more professional to tweak LACMA so that it goes way beyond its 60-plus history. Or way beyond, okay, its history of rube-ville. Hi, Ted G!
There were a few empty vitrines, too, and an installation still under construction—odd in such a high-profile opening.
https://www.sitelinesb.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LACMA-David-Geffen-Galleries-missing-June-Wayne-lithographs-by-Siteline-768x576.jpeg
^ I can deal with all the gray concrete walls (that aren't blank) and a non-hierarchical installation, but not having the collection as fully on display as possible from day one is another version of LACMA 1965.
If Govan and his staff were on the ball, and they didn't have enough time or manpower to open the Geffen with the best display possible, they should have wanted that known far and wide, perhaps with PR announcements and large signage.
Michael Govan, meet Richard Brown. Richard Brown, meet Michael Govan.
2026 vs 1965: As much as things change, some things never change.
He's proof of that.
An NYC earthquake is just announced!!
The Met and the Neue Galerie announce plans for a landmark MERGER in 2028!!!!
This is game-changing for the Met!!!!!!!
NO FURTHER DETAILS AT THIS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Director, Neue Galerie New York]]
Certainly the finest collection of German and Austrian modern art in America, if not outside of Vienna entirely.
This rivals or surpasses the merger of the Corcoran Gallery with the Smithsonian. And the merger of the Brooklyn Museum's vaunted costume collection with the Met's Costume Institute.
A huge gap in the Met's collection will be quite perfectly neatly filled.
HOORAY FOR NEW YORK!!!!