Now LACMA is really rudderless

In a messy, knock down, drag-out fight, don’t you hate when there’s nobody to root for?

That’s essentially the hollow situation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where push finally came to shove over the weekend. A power struggle between trustees and museum staff over a planned expansion of the Wilshire Boulevard facility resulted in the abrupt “retirement” of the museum’s director.

Normally in this kind of dust-up, the art professionals deserve our first consideration. They, not the trustees, shoulder the arduous day-to-day responsibility of working on the public’s behalf in the cause of art. Even if they’re not so good at it, the enormous difficulty of the task needs acknowledging. An art museum director must satisfy the wildly differing demands of a diverse public, a trained professional staff and a gaggle of competitive trustees who are often self-made entrepreneurs, each used to having things his own way.

But not this time. This time all one can do is stare and blink.

That’s because 10 years ago LACMA’s board decided to dispense with the routine idea that an actual art museum professional should run the county art museum. Instead they hired a university official with zero knowledge, skill or experience in the field to direct LACMA’s professional staff.

In effect the board chose to replicate itself in the director’s office. The setup meant that no one in a position of museum authority was being guided by professional conscience.

Major institutions in New York, Chicago and elsewhere had already experimented with similar schemes by the 1970s, as American art museums grew larger and more complex; all abandoned them as failures. But LACMA’s board sailed straight into the inevitable storm, hoisting as its standard the creaky mythology of L.A. as innovative and unique.

Now that proven bad idea has come a cropper. And in a brawl between opportunists, neither side deserves our sympathy or support.

Here’s how push came to shove by Sunday.

On March 14, employees at LACMA were asked to remove their ID badges and fill the hundred or so chairs set out for a news conference announcing the late-fall launch of a major but long-struggling building expansion. The dais was dotted with luminaries -- local billionaire Eli Broad, Italian architect Renzo Piano, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, LACMA Director Andrea L. Rich and others. A phalanx of television cameras was on hand, and for the sake of appearances on the 6 o’clock news it had to look like big public enthusiasm was greeting the momentous announcement. LACMA staff was the museum-equivalent of the paid seat-fillers at the Academy Awards -- the folks who rush in to keep the place looking packed while the powerful movers and shakers come and go.

Over this last weekend, one of the museum’s movers and shakers suddenly went. Rich quit, effective in November.

No overt sign of discord had interrupted the carefully stage-managed news conference, where $156 million in pledges were announced and news of a year-end start for the construction of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA was unveiled. Down in the bowels of the ship, though, steam was rising in the boilers. Control of the Wilshire Boulevard complex was at issue.

A job listing had recently appeared in London’s Art Newspaper, announcing a search for a LACMA deputy director for contemporary art. Usually directors hire their staff, deputies included, but in this instance museum-watchers were puzzled. What was the ad doing in London’s Art Newspaper? That is not where American directors of art museums normally post their job listings.

The two most commonly used professional venues contained no notice of the LACMA job. Even LACMA’s own website, which lists available positions ranging from director of conservation to head librarian, made no mention of it.

They still don’t. That’s because the deputy job isn’t really available.

Broad, the trustee who pledged $60 million to develop a quasi-independent museum on LACMA’s grounds, has a couple of candidates already in mind. One is Bruce Ferguson, dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Another is the longtime deputy director at New York’s troubled Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lisa Dennison. Broad has always been deferential to the New York art establishment, and he who pays the bills often expects to call the shots.

And yet: Even junior administrators know it’s intolerable when their “deputy” actually works for someone else. Try getting that scheme by a museum director who’s an experienced former bureaucratic in-fighter at UCLA.

So the jockeying began. In a March 7 interview about the highly unusual job listing, Rich told The Times: “They [the board’s search committee, who placed the peculiar ad] are doing a search in the classic, university way. They will come up with a slate of candidates and present it to me and I’ll decide.”

Whether that method is indeed “the classic, university way” is a matter of considerable doubt, and why it should have any bearing on an art museum is anybody’s guess. The bizarre characterization made one wonder whether LACMA’s director even knew a “help wanted” ad had been placed. Either way, battle lines were drawn.

Later that week, Dennison came to town for interviews. Certain discrepancies apparently emerged between Broad’s vision of the deputy director’s job and Rich’s conception of it. Those conflicts now seem to have been resolved. Rich, 61, will be gone by November.

Everybody is trying to put the best face on the sudden “retirement.” LACMA still has tens of millions of dollars to raise for construction and endowment in its multiphase expansion plan, and now there are two big jobs to be filled, not just one. (Perhaps the nascent deputy will be promoted.) For that, unfortunately, LACMA will have to go to the back of a lengthy line; major director searches are already underway at heavy-hitters such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute.

But what ended badly, started badly. The vacuum in professional conscience from both the boardroom (expected) and the director’s suite (unexpected) means LACMA has been a rudderless ship for longer than a decade.

Here are two pitiable examples of what that absence can mean.

Rich came to LACMA after 34 years at UCLA, where she rose to the post of vice chancellor. She restructured museum curatorial departments into university-style “centers” and “institutes,” because that’s the only thing she knew. Americans have always been ambivalent about art, but tout education and they fall to their knees. Yet an elemental distinction was either lost on LACMA’s overseers or set aside for convenience: Schools are organized to deal with ideas, while art museums are structured to deal with objects.

Rich’s departure also coincides with a repulsive profit-sharing agreement forged between LACMA and a corporate entertainment conglomerate to present “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” this summer.

No other major American art museum (except innovative, unique L.A.’s) was willing to countenance that smarmy scheme. Pop-culture consumerism was trotted out as artistic populism -- but it’s tough to claim a principled commitment to struggles against unfair privilege when you’re also setting a national record for highest ticket price ever ($30) to see a for-profit art exhibition.

Like I said, there really isn’t anyone to root for in this mess -- except perhaps the forgotten art museum public. Everybody loves the abject underdog.