The Encyclopedic City

Another thing you hear is “Well, you can’t have that kind of attendance because [LACMA] is too hard to get to.” I hear that all the time. And every Saturday I walk over to the Grove with my 21?2-year-old daughter. Eighteen million people or something like that went to the Grove last year.

LACMA director Michael Govan with Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael) (1975–81). (Photos by Kevin Scanlon)

There are more images of Dan Flavin's work at the end of the article

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More About

• Michael Govan
• Thomas Krens
• Jeff Koons
• Visual Arts
• Cultural History

Dan Flavin, untitled (to my dear bitch, Airily), 1981
(Courtesy Museum Associates/LACMA)

More than Disneyland, right?

Yeah, so it’s two blocks away. So now I look at people and say, “Okay, now tell me again you can’t get here.” Then they say, “People aren’t generous enough.” In terms of giving. I actually argue from what I can see in the last 15 years, in the fields of medicine, increasingly in education, L.A. is catching up with all the big cities. And so it lags in art. So then you would say it’s just a matter of time and maturity.

But why do we still have this embarrassing problem of people like Edward Broida giving their art collections to MoMA? That’s obviously something that has to change.

That is hugely embarrassing. And it should be the headline: “Why?” We have people on our board who have given more to the National Gallery [of Art] than to LACMA. One person has given more to the Museum of Modern Art than to LACMA. You know why.

It’s prestige.

Right. Until you reach a critical mass of prestige, you don’t get there. And that’s continuously eluded this museum in particular, and other museums in the sense that Broida could have given his collection to MOCA too, but we just don’t have the prestige that the Museum of Modern Art has. Now, we’re not going to get it instantly. You’re going to have to build it over time. It’s just a matter of investment. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

If everyone with a good art collection in L.A. donated their art collection here, for example, critical mass would be instant. I’m not saying that’s going to happen tomorrow, but what you can see increasingly, given the interest in art collectors growing here, is that you don’t have to go far.

Is there a danger in giving Eli Broad so much name recognition that you scare other people away?

It shouldn’t, because this is a huge museum. The collections here dwarf his, and people have to get a perspective on it. It’s 60,000 square feet. We could be 300,000 square feet of exhibition space in the future. But, you know, L.A. has also suffered from that not-working-together problem. That probably is the one true thing you can say. From my experience in New York, to build museums you need an incredible amount of teamwork.

New Yorkers love New York.

They love New York, and they’re so jammed together that there is a kind of forced teamwork that you have to get used to — being around people you may or may not love but you can work with. And now in L.A., I don’t know. You know, there’s a bad history — Norton Simon, Armand Hammer. The place is littered with stories of people taking their marbles and going off somewhere else. There are two reasons: One, it’s somehow inherent in the place, its separateness and all that. The other is that there hasn’t really been a good enough idea to rally around. You know, a contemporary art museum is a great thing, but not everyone loves contemporary art. So MOCA has done a great job in collecting energy; people have worked together. And here [at LACMA] we have incredible things — the Carter Collection of Dutch paintings, which is world-class, and the [Robert Gore] Rifkind Center for German Expressionism, which is probably the center for German expressionist works on paper, certainly in the nation and for a large part of the world. So we have these amazing resources. I think the thing that it’s lacked is the working together to build a great museum. That’s the key, working together.

Every big city has a museum, and most of the encyclopedic museums have an audience that’s 40 percent regional and 60 percent tourists. That’s the standard. In some places, [the tourist percentage] is higher, say 85 percent, and in some places it’s maybe 55 percent. Here it’s 15 percent tourists. What does that mean? It means you’re not on the map. The city is, but the museum isn’t.

Dan Flavin, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972
(Courtesy Museum Associates/LACMA)

How large is LACMA’s membership?

It’s over 65,000 people — one of the largest in the nation. We have Next Gen, which is kids under 17, and then they can bring an adult with them for free. We have 40,000 of those. The education programs are among the best in the nation. We’re on the map regionally, we have a really good and, I think, fairly loyal audience. And we have great resources. We just haven’t leveraged that into visibility.