The Broad in Paris
 |
| Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: piotr iłowiecki, CC BY-SA 2.0. |
The Broad will be lending 164 works from its collection to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Scheduled for summer 2027, the Paris loan will coincide with the closure of the Broad's top-floor galleries for construction. The expanded Broad is expected to open in 2028. The ground floor will remain open through construction.
The Paris exhibition puts Eli Broad's collection in a Frank Gehry building. In the 1980s Broad hired Gehry, not yet a superstar, to design his Brentwood home. Broad grew impatient with the pace of Gehry's work and handed the working drawings to a commercial architect (Langdon Wilson) to finish. Gehry disowned the home and never set foot in it.
Comments
Dozens of works are coming out of the vault and into the galleries through October, offering a chance to see more of The Broad’s over 2,000-work collection, and a preview of what’s to come... From July through the fall, there’s a new reason to visit The Broad every month. [End quote]
There was (or is) a banner hanging near the Broad that promotes something like "Free admission." That along with their latest website made me wonder how museums deal with attendance figures.
Although most cultural institutions are non-profit, the ego (and pride) of a museum's staff must make them prefer good annual visitor numbers compared with lower ones.
George Lucas remarked several months ago that most stores in art museums lose money. So they're run more as a subsidized service than due to demand or for a profit.
The Met and MOMA also get a large share of their annual attendance from tourists, foreign or domestic, while the Broad relies on more locals.
The Lucas Museum, if only by default, may end up being the only art museum in LA that gets a fair share of its annual attendance from tourists or out-of-towners.
Traditional art museums like the Met or MOMA are good enough that even casual, not-into-art-type visitors make an effort to visit them while other museums (eg, the ones in LA that are non-must-see and the opposite of Paris's Louvre) are generally not.
> safe Paris.
In turn, international publicity about LA's own condition (ie, homeless encampments, burglaries of celebrity's homes, desolate streets of vacant storefronts, etc) must chomp down on outsiders' impression of the city too.
As for annual attendance figures, Michael Govan commented on The Grove shopping center a few blocks north of LACMA attracting way more people per year than the museum does. I wonder how the Geffen is affecting that?
A writer from I believe the East Coast mentioned not long ago that after his visit to the Lucas, he noticed the Geffen in comparison was sort of lifeless.
The Pavilion for Japanese Art @LACMA has been closed for eight years, eight months and two weeks....
join_save_lacma, Instagram:
It’s being used as a conservation lab and may always be a conservation lab, because when @lacma designed that new building they didn’t include a conservation lab because they desperately needed to cut costs and a new conservation lab would’ve been too expensive. [End quote]
Sometimes i wonder if LACMA's director (mostly), Board of Trustees and staff deserve to be sued for a cultural version of malpractice.,
Behind the reception desk, there is a staircase to nowhere. Of course, visitors, are naturally drawn to it because of its proximity to the desk. I call it the staircase to nowhere because it's not clear what is up there. If you turn left, towards the light coming from outside, you reach a dead end/closet. Typical Gehry.
On the top, terrace level, the sails that you see in the picture above block a direct view of the Eiffel Tower. Not the only place in this building where design elements take precedence over human experience.
To get to the sunken court, at the bottom of the sloped fountain you see in the picture above, you have to traverse a narrow path bordered on one side by a blank wall and the other by a shallow reflecting pool. The humanity?
As if that was not inhospitable enough, the path/view is obstructed even more by a line of angled columns that are lighted a garish yellow. The columns are a work by Eliasson. Gehry approved the installation. Ugh.
If only it was all worth it? But it is not because the sunken court was not envisioned as a third space. Rather, it serves as a forecourt for an auditorium. You are not meant to linger here.
When I visited, there was nothing happening in the auditorium. This added to the lack of intention which characterizes the flow/feeling of the entire building.
--- J. Garcin