More than fifteen years have passed since the Getty Center’s spectacular campus in Brentwood, Los Angeles, was opened to the public (Fig.I). An Editorial published in this Magazine to mark the occasion asked in passing whether it was ‘wise for a hyper-rich institution such as this to climb a hill, turn its back on the city, and devote itself to the study and accumulation of western high art’.1# In Britain and elsewhere, we are now five years into a period of austerity measures that have attempted, with dubious effect, to expiate the fiscal and regulatory sins of the recent past. Museums remain vulnerable to cuts in public funding and occasional attempts by public officials to plunder their collections. In May the governor of Michigan declared that the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is an asset subject to the city’s emergency management measures. Michigan’s attorney general disagreed, noting in a formal opinion that the collection is held as a charitable trust. Although such episodes are rare on both sides of the Atlantic, it is troubling that the same arguments have to be rehearsed. It is therefore heartening to note the Getty’s role in formulating one of the most effective arguments ever advanced for the public role of museums.

In 2002 the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute launched a concerted effort to preserve the record of artistic endeavours in post-War Los Angeles. This timely act of scholarly localism sought to fill a gaping hole in the historical record, which was exhaustive on the subject of artists in New York but scant when it came to the Los Angeles region (and, by implication, elsewhere). Pacific Standard Time developed from a programme of archival acquisitions and oral history interviews into an ambitious research project involving numerous fellowships, collaboration with other institutions in the region and more than $11 million in grants from the Getty Foundation. The project reached fruition as Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, a set of exhibitions and events staged at more than sixty venues in southern California between October 2011 and March 2012.

By any scholarly standards, the enterprise was an unqualified success. It generated valuable new research and abundant leads for further investigation. More than forty exhibition catalogues were published, several of which contained the first sustained assessments of their subjects. This went far beyond the satisfaction of long-neglected figures finally getting their due. The research and exhibitions set an admirable standard for investigating the polyphonic creativity of post-War Los Angeles, and they presented a comprehensive account at a crucial stage in the passage of art from critical commentary to historical record. Whatever amnesia might otherwise have struck has been averted. The next full-scale programme, scheduled to open in 2017, will focus on Latin American art, including the history of its connections with Los Angeles.

Pacific Standard Time presented the best face of museums to the public. It dominated and elevated cultural discussion in the region for months, and it remains influential. Gratifyingly high attendance figures were undoubtedly helped by a well-executed advertising campaign on television, on radio and in print. The exhibitions demonstrated the appeal of intriguing stories rather than star quality, overdressed themes or the blockbuster effect. The results had breadth and depth: lucidity without glibness. Enthusiastic critical responses noted the freshness of the mat­erial, but the credit belongs primarily to the institutions and curatorial teams responsible for devising and installing consistently polished shows. Given the recurring need for cultural institutions to justify their existence to demagogues who really should (and often do) know better, it is significant that Pacific Standard Time generated an estimated $280.5 million in economic activity, including $19.4 million in taxes for hard-pressed state and local governments. It is difficult to overstate the importance of demonstrating that a high standard of original research can attract the public and generate revenues for both private and public benefit.

Pacific Standard Time was imbued from the start with an exemplary attitude to research. Although the Getty launched the initiative and provided much of the funding, its conduct increasingly resembled the support that major foundations give to university research projects. Each participating institution was able to develop its exhibition organically, according to the unfolding logic of the research rather than to a contrived rubric or list of objectives. Exhibitions of that kind, and the supporting work in catalogues, are essentially sponsored research projects. The procedures for research, publication and display should be comparable to the standards at major research universities.

If the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time was the good news, continuing disarray at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, was less encouraging. From its inception in 1979, its ambitions exceeded its scale, as did the internal disagreements that occasionally disrupted its activities. MOCA quickly established a reputation for innovation, sometimes out of necessity. While it raised funds for its permanent home, which opened on Grand Avenue in 1986, MOCA leased a disused warehouse and police-car garage from the city for a peppercorn rent. Frank Gehry directed the renovation of the building, which opened in 1983 as the Temporary Contemporary but is now known as the Geffen Contemporary. The building’s atmosphere of urban reclamation in process suits the scale and ethos of much con­temporary art. Many exhibition spaces have since exploited the aesthetic and economic benefits of the approach. MOCA’s permanent collection of approximately five thousand objects includes some gems, such as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1949 and a number of early works by Robert Rauschenberg. The Museum’s reputation, however, rests primarily on its track record of outstanding exhibitions. Its incisive monographic shows and thematic surveys set a consistently high standard for presenting objects and scholarship with equal aplomb, often in shows that travelled well to other venues.

MOCA’s current travails began more than ten years ago, when it started to meet its persistent annual deficit by drawing from its endowment. The financial crisis of 2008 reduced the value of an already weakened endowment at an institution that had struggled to meet costs even when its endowment was five or six times as large. In December 2008 the Director, Jeremy Strick, resigned, and a single Trustee, Eli Broad, pledged $15–30 million in matching funds to stabilise the Museum’s finances. In June 2010 Jeffrey Deitch arrived as Director. Deitch had a secure reputation as a bold and imaginative dealer but had limited experience with non-profit organisations. His curatorial tastes were at odds with those of the Chief Curator, Paul Schimmel, who left abruptly in June 2012. That event provoked a crisis of confidence in Deitch’s leadership and curatorial priorities, followed by a noisy season of resignations, recriminations and doubts about MOCA’s viability. Last winter and into the spring, MOCA discussed partnership arrangements with the University of Southern California and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art proposed that it absorb MOCA and raise $100 million on its behalf. Unpersuaded by these possibilities, MOCA launched a campaign to increase its endowment to $100 million and thus maintain its independence. In July MOCA announced that Deitch will resign upon the completion of that campaign.

Although there may have been some merit in the view that MOCA was becoming distracted by celebrity culture and its financial allure, it is surely not impossible to find an equipoise among style, content and cash. The real problems have been less tractable. First, MOCA has thirty-nine Trustees (excluding ex-officio members) on its board, a high number for an organisation that in 2010–11 had expenses of $17.5 million and net assets (excluding works of art) of $38.25 million. Conflicts have occasionally suggested that the boundary between the Trustees and the operation of the institution requires clarification. Secondly, MOCA grew into a centre of curatorial excellence without adhering to a similar standard of financial competence. The endowment should not be misused to pay the bills. Finally, MOCA is vulnerable to the effects of clashes of personality and imbalances of power. Apportioning blame to individuals misses the point. Any museum that can descend into crisis because of the arrival or departure of an individual, however high-profile or gifted, is fragile. MOCA is unlikely to rectify its problems in the long term unless it redefines the lines along which it operates. It also needs to replace the curators it has lost.

The circumstances surrounding the exhibition A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California at the Geffen Contemporary (to 16th September)#2 illustrate the cumulative effects of mismanaged crises and the resulting loss of focus. The exhibition opened two months late after budgetary concerns and arguments over the curatorial premise threatened to completely derail the $600,000 project. When it opened, the guest curator responsible for organising the show was credited on the wall text merely with the ‘original concept’. A more stable MOCA with a permanent and adequate curatorial staff might have been able to prevent this latest drama from overshadowing the production.

A New Sculpturalism is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.3 This reduced-scale continuation of the Getty’s earlier programme also includes the exhibition The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (to 15th September). As its proposed arrangement with MOCA indicated, LACMA has for some time been exploring various ways to increase its standing among art museums nationally and internationally. Unlike the best-known comprehensive art museums in the United States – most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – LACMA has neither a magisterial reputation nor a stately Neo-classical building. It is a relatively young institution with a collection that is healthy but not festooned with treasures. Its financial situation is stable and improving, but not yet secure. It does, however, enjoy a distinct advantage over comparable institutions: twenty-two acres of land in the middle of a major city. Few urban museums could have considered acquiring Levitated mass (2012) by Michael Heizer, a 340-ton granite boulder situated over a trench that allows visitors to walk under the rock. LACMA’s spacious setting is rich in possibilities.

At present, the LACMA campus is less than the sum of its parts. The Museum opened in 1965 with three pavilions designed by William Pereira (Fig.II). Fountains and pools gave the appearance of floating buildings; unanticipated seepage from the La Brea Tar Pits – remnants of southern California’s ancient geology, still bubbling at the surface in Hancock Park – meant the pools had to go. The Robert O. Anderson Building (now called the Art of the Americas Building), completed in 1986, improved the quality of LACMA’s gallery space but diminished the remaining aesthetic coherence. An elegant pavilion for Japanese art, which opened in 1988, was initially devised for a site in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and then as a proposed addition to the Metropolitan Museum. It is splendid, but a one-off. By 2001 LACMA was ready to consider a plan by Rem Koolhaas to demolish all but two buildings: the Japanese pavilion and the May Company building, a fine example of pre-War modernism that LACMA bought in 1994. Lack of funds stopped the Koolhaas plan. Instead, Renzo Piano designed two new buildings, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion, as part of an effort to rethink the layout of the campus. That layout does give LACMA an airy, unconstrained sense of pace and space quite different from most comprehensive mus­eums. At its best, visiting feels like a stroll through an exposition or a biennial. At other times the absence of strategy is manifest.

The current proposal, by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, is for a single building to replace all the pre-1988 pavilions. As presented in several models on display in The Presence of the Past, Zumthor’s preliminary design (Fig.III) has biomorphically curvilinear contours with a glass-walled ambulatory that encloses six zones of rectilinear galleries. Seen from above, the building would, if realised, echo the nearby tar pits, not only in shape but also in colour. The design calls for a roof covered with sufficient solar panels to make LACMA a net contributor of energy to the city. Eight supporting ‘cores’ would elevate the single-storey exhibition level above the ground. These cores are intended to provide multiple entrance points and to house many of the service facilities of the Museum: auditoria, offices, conservation and storage, for example. In theory, the cores would grant free choice of ingress and route, and their glass walls would allow views into the private life of a museum. In practice, a museum allows visitors and passers-by to see what it wants them to see. As for allowing the public to watch employees at work, there is a thin line between demystification and distraction. Although there is cause for scepticism and much that requires clarification in Zumthor’s conception, its spirit of openness and enlightened citizenship is a good starting point for considering what role this Museum should play in the life of the city.

The Presence of the Past is more proposal than exhibition. It sets out Zumthor’s plan, gives examples of his earlier work as supporting evidence, and explains the shortcomings of the existing layout. This material is presented as an early glimpse into the process through which LACMA plans to replace the pre-1988 pavilions and integrate the site. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is currently raising funds to put its proposed museum in the May Company building at the western edge of the campus.) There is, however, little room in the show for dissent. It is essentially an attempt to invite consensus. Given the fractious history of LACMA’s physical growth, and the Mus­eum’s dependence upon multiple sources of financial and civic support, this approach is wise. It would be a shame to see another plan for LACMA’s campus join the list of missed opportunities. At this point, the estimated cost of realising Zumthor’s design is $450 million, with an additional $200 million needed to make the project viable. If the proposal develops beyond the stage of bold visions and fundraising enthusiasm, it will require a great deal of goodwill, diplomacy and resilience. Some museums in Los Angeles, however, are gaining in con­fidence as institutions with a local and global sense of purpose. Their recent accomplishments, and the standards they have set, give them every reason to be optimistic.

1    Editorial: ‘Upon a peak in Brentwood’, The Burlington Magazine 140 (1998), p.3.
2    Catalogue: A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California. Edited by Christopher Mount, with essays by idem, Margaret Crawford, Johanna Vandemoortele, Sam Lubell and Nicholas Olsberg. 272 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2013), $65. ISBN 978–0–8478–4011–3.
3    See the review by Lucy Bradnock of Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 in this Magazine, 155 (2013), pp.517–18.