The New York Times hates hates hates the new Broad Contemporaty Art Museum (BCAM) that's opening at
LACMA this weekend. It hates not only the building, but the art inside as well. Architecture critic
Nicolai Ouroussouf sniffs the building "Will no doubt thrill those whose main focus is how a museum's design makes the art look. But architecture is about more than the quality of light" while art critic
Roberta Smith looks around at the Broad's collection of contemporary lights like Cy Twombly, Jeff Koons and John Baldesari and huffs "the goal should be to do something that no one else is doing, not the thing that everyone has already done." The only thing the two of them both like is Chris Burden's lampost sculpture "Urban Light".
Both writers use the opening of BCAM as an opportunity to diss L.A.'s recent civic efforts to make Southern California a more cosmopolitan place, rightly pointing out that Richard Meir's Getty Center turns its back on the city both literally and spiritually. But that was more than a decade ago, an eternity in a city so young. Since then we've had Morphosis' CalTrans, Disney Concert Hall and more than half a dozen exciting new building in the works, from a Century City
vertical oasis by Jean Nouvel to three seperate development projects for downtown.
The New York critics complain that Renzo Piano's LACMA addition isn't "L.A. enough" and they do it in a tone so strident, you can't help but think that anything short of Piano building a freeway through the LaBrea Tar Pits would be deemed inauthentic. In fact, Ouroussouf makes the freeway comparison to an earlier proposal for LACMA by Rem Koolhaas, which planned on demolioshing all but one of the current structures and covering it with an enormous glass tent. "Mr. Koolhaas's design reflected a shrewd awareness of what made Los Angeles one of the most original urban creations of the 20th century. The elevated concrete slab eerily evoked a displaced fragment of elevated freeway", he writes, before damning Piano for keeping the original buildings in his design. One of the main reasons Koolhaas addition was scrapped was that they couldn't figure out a way to clean pigeon droppings off the glass tent roof. With BCAM, LACMA now gets to contend with a similar problem--only the incoming is from critics instead of birds.
Labels: los angeles, visual art
