L.A. at Center : Museum Mania Grips the Globe

Present culture has been compared to the American Renaissance of the turn of the century. Then, overnight millionaires built beach houses rivaling the Pitti Palace, filled them with art, then endowed public museums to house their treasures.

Now another century approaches apogee, and once again the view of the universe is spectacular and over-scaled. Once again the panorama is crowned with a frenzy of museum building that seems to acquire larger meaning as a symbol of a social renaissance or--perhaps--decline. Opinions vary.

“The fancy new museums come from people on boards of directors who need that kind of symbol,” Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry said. “Rich people want rich symbols. I don’t think that marble palaces talk about a way of life we should be living. Too much money is being spent on building that would be better used to buy art to go in them.”

‘Like the Religious Act’

Arata Isozaki, who designed Los Angeles’ nearly completed Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill, views the museum boom in practical, witty and philosophical terms.

“In the past, religious buildings had a strong role in the society,” he said. “Now art is coming to take over the position where the gods are no more. Making art is something like the religious act. Even the activity of raising funds and collecting art for the museum is like the religious activity of the past.”

Historically, American museums have drawn significant aspects of their character from three separate models: the European repository of royal treasure; the educational institution for the common man and P. T. Barnum’s carnivalesque American Museum of the 1850s.

In Victorian California, the impulse to artistic pomp took the form of Sacramento’s Crocker Museum, established in the family’s Italianate mansion with railroad money in 1885. The state’s first art museum, it set a pattern of early cultural dominance in Northern California.

L.A. at Center of Boom

Today it is the southern part of the state that rides the crest of a new surge in a two-decade museum building boom. Los Angeles seems to twinkle at the center of a worldwide museum epidemic. This is undoubtedly due in part to the presence here of the J. Paul Getty Museum. In 1982, the Getty Trust took control of a $3.6-billion endowment left to the museum by its oil-baron founder. Something about having the world’s richest museum in its backyard has focused planetary attention on Southern California’s version of museum mania.

It is a fever unlikely to abate before the Malibu-based repository opens a second museum and research facilities in Brentwood. Being designed by architect Richard Meier, it is expected to materialize in the 1990s.

But late this year, international attention will galvanize on Los Angeles’ launch of what amounts to two major new museums, Isozaki’s new Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Bunker Hill’s California Plaza development, and the Robert O. Anderson Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The latter will crown a $52.4-million expansion at the county museum and fulfill its master plan’s intention of creating a proper forum for modern and contemporary art. The $20-million MOCA building will provide a long-sought focus for both Los Angeles’ highly reputed innovative art and the concoctions of the international circuit.

That, however, is only the curl of the wave. Recently, Beverly Hills decided to transform the Greystone Mansion into a museum to house the contemporary collections of Frederick Weisman (a move reflective of a growing number of private museums such as the Saatchi Museum in London). UCLA’s excellent Museum of Culturang its own free-standing campus museum. The Laguna Beach Museum of Art is under reconstruction. The Newport Harbor Art Museum is considering its third expansion, and San Diego has plans for two museums of contemporary art.

Widespread Expansion

It appears that every museum that isn’t expanding either just did so, or is brand new anyway. The Afro-American Museum of Cultural History in Exposition Park is new. In 1984, the Southwest Museum, dormant for decades, was brought sparklingly back on line. The same year, San Marino’s Huntington Art Gallery opened an American wing (they are now making the best of a recent fire to refurbish smoke-damaged galleries, art and objects). Since 1962, about 15 new art museums or significant special exhibitions galleries have been built in California, as many as in the previous half-century. By conservative estimate, California has some 50 active, professional art museums and public galleries, plus scores of smaller venues and commercial showplaces.

“L.A.’s time has come,” said New York architect Norman Pfeiffer, whose firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates is transforming the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “The city reflects the Pacific Rim and Asia the way New York reflected Europe 200 years ago. It’s very international.”

And at the hub of an international phenomenon. Confirming statistics are surprisingly hard to come by, but nobody denies the existence of the eruption. The U.S. boom is widespread. New York plays a continuing role, but new building and expansion is concentrated in the West and in the Sun Belt, signaling a spread, decentralization and growing popularity of high and advanced culture.

Some 30 new museums materialized in the West since 1964, according to “Museums for a New Century,” a report by the American Assn. of Museums. For a while, Texas led the sweepstakes, sprouting showplaces like freckles on a redhead’s nose. In less than two decades, eight very substantial museums mushroomed from Corpus Christi to Dallas-Fort Worth. When Texas slowed down, California picked up the slack.

International Activity

Internationally, the view is hardly less spectacular. MOCA’s Isozaki estimates that Japan has built 50 new museums since 1960. West Germany--the hands-down champion museum-builder--offers estimates of new museums running up to 300.

Some countries’ projects are more impressive symbolically than numerically. England is not only expanding London’s venerable National Gallery, but has given the job to the radical American architect Robert Venturi.

Francophiles still reel from the conservative nation’s decision to modernize the Louvre using American architect I. M. Pei, who shocked many with his plan to put glass pyramids in the Napoleon Court. For some, shock turned to chagrin when it was learned that the Louvre’s French Impressionist pictures housed in the beloved little Jeu de Paume museum will be integrated into a new museum for 19th-Century art expected to open Dec. 2 in the vast former railroad depot, the Gare d’Orsay.

About the only major developed country not building museums is Italy, which is more or less one big, gorgeous museum anyway.

Such a widespread phenomenon is bound to be fueled by a galaxy of motives--practical, sociological and historical. Museums rising in Germany and Japan, for example, are seen as reflecting crowning cultural ornaments in a successful four-decade recovery from the devastation of World War II.

‘A Critical Mass’

“Here it has to do with the growth of the city,” said Earl (Rusty) Powell, director of the 70,000-member Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Cultural development follows economic development. You don’t just decide to build or expand a museum. First you have a collection. It expands until it reaches critical mass. An outgrown facility has to enlarge to encompass the collections.”

Lawrence Reger, director of the American Assn. of Museums in Washington, pointed out that the largest number of building projects are expansions or renovations of existing institutions, rather than free-standing new institutions such as MOCA.

“There is a need to provide better care for the objects. People naturally tend to concentrate on the public spaces, but climate control, conservation and areas behind the scenes are terribly important.”

Some of these nuts-and-bolts matters also bear on an exponential rise in the popularity of museums. Beginning with the astonishing success of “Treasures of Tutankhamen” in 1978, museums have been gripped by the “blockbuster syndrome”--organizing exhibitions of opulent treasures or beloved masterpieces that attract stadium-size crowds.

Study of Museum-Goers

“Just all the body heat generated by the crowds in the galleries calls for new kinds of climate control systems,” Reger said.

Enter popularity.

“Museums used to be musty places for musing alone,” the County Museum of Art’s Powell said. “Today we have a better-educated audience that wants something more than backpacking on the weekend. One study found the average museum-goer today--along with increasing numbers of school groups and senior citizens--is young, college-educated and upward mobile. The description tallies almost exactly with that of the yuppie. Museums are becoming easy-way-to-learn formats for general education.”

MOCA Director Richard Koshalek said: “Museums have become a sexy subject. More people want to be involved. We already have 25,000 members, which is practically unheard of. Everybody is excited but also worried. Is there is enough art and people and money to support all this? I’m worried about finding talented people to be curators and run the museums.”

‘Museums Are Big Business’

County Museum of Art architect Pfeiffer said: “Museums are a popular craze at the moment. They are taking on an expanded social role as places of public gathering. They have restaurants and shops. The Met is a good example with its huge gift shop and book store. Museums are big business.”

Enter economics.

Reger of the museum association said there are about 6,000 museums of all types in the United States, and 25% of them have 75% of the money. Among these, according to Karl Meyer’s book, “The Art Museum,” about 340 art museums are the most richly endowed. Despite apparent wealth, leading art institutions have suffered seven-figure deficits in the past decade.

A major reason for this imbalance appears to be the slow de facto withdrawal of public funding from cultural institutions. In California, the principal symptom of this drift was Proposition 13, the radical property-tax reform of 1978. It had a revolutionary impact on institutions such as the County Museum of Art. Despite the fact that its operating budget has gone from $1.6 million in 1965 to $18 million in 1985, insiders claim the museum has suffered a real-dollar loss of 50% in public funding.

In broader terms, Reger said the federal endowment entities such as the National Endowment for the Arts have not suffered actual funding cuts, but he added that stable income is eroded by inflation.

Effects of Tax Reform

“Reagan Administration policies have not really impacted yet. I am afraid that cuts in other areas like social services will effect the cultural field by causing private charitable sources to rethink their priorities. A tax reform law could have a negative effect and create difficult times ahead.”

Martin Friedman, the respected veteran director of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, pointed to museums’ need to seek new sources of funding, collections and audience. “With the rise of corporate collections, museum directors now court corporations they way they used to woo private collectors. Look at (Manhattan’s) Whitney Museum. They have caused a lot of fuss by opening satellite museums in several corporate headquarters.”

Apparently museums not only are popular, they must be popular as a matter of survival. Culture is being frankly “marketed.” The “Museums for a New Century” study cites a 1981 economic impact report by the National Endowment for the Arts that proudly trumpets the fact that 49 institutions in six cities attracted a total of $305 million to their areas, and winds up with the effusive conclusion, “Clearly culture pays!”

Enter Post-Modernism.

Revivalist Style

As an art term, “Post-Modernism” describes an aesthetic formed in the wake of a pervasive belief that esoteric avant-garde art has had its day. Post-Modernism believes that it is time for something new, or rather, something old, recycled. It is a slick, eclectic, decorative, revivalist style emphasizing design and entertainment values over blood-and-guts art and witty, historically allusive architecture over the spartan rigors of international modernism.

By extension, it can be seen to describe the sensibility of the yuppie and the neo-conservative with their mixed-bag of attachments to tradition, status and love of surfaces, athletic values and money. Post-Modernism is narcissistic, exhibitionistic, puritanical, basically anti-intellectual and anti-Bohemian. It is a consumerist Zeitgeist affecting the look of the new museums.

Richard Meier, who styles himself a “Neo-Modernist,” said: “A building should be of its time and Post-Modernism reflects the attitude of today. There can be great buildings in any style but I have yet to see a great Post-Modernist building.

“And they are not just cultural institutions any more; they are magnets in the social life of the community. They attract people with restaurants and parties. I understand that the Metropolitan Museum will rent its Egyptian Temple Dendur for a social event.”

Bold Attractions

For some old-timers, this tendency is tantamount to pagans dancing in the cathedral and money changers in the temple, but in such an ambiance are the new museums being built. They are symbols of cultural arrival and social centers that promise a positive practical effect on their communities by attracting tourism and money. Thus, it is not the role of the museum to be physically modest, but rather to call attention to itself with a certain assertiveness and panache. Significantly, many new museum commissions go to high-profile architects who produce buildings that are works of art in themselves and reflect the current vitality of the discipline.

The scenario of the Museum of Contemporary Art provides a case in point. In order to get its programs started, MOCA had architect Gehry renovate a vast former police garage in Little Tokyo. This “Temporary Contemporary” proved enormously popular, but its style is to fulfill a ‘60s-era ideal of a large flexible neutral space that plays handmaiden to the art, while Isozaki’s elegant Bunker Hill building is more obviously a landmark.

“I think museums should be neutral inside with no decorative or architectural statement,” said Isozaki from his Tokyo office during a telephone interview. “Outside they should be symbols of the city. I tried to design MOCA with the character of L.A. in mind.”

Both Isozaki’s MOCA and the County Museum’s Anderson Building have an aura of subtly stylish Post-Modernist exoticism.

Stone and Skylights

The county museum’s design has a massive facade of stone, tile and glass brick. A huge ceremonial entry leads to a vaulting entrance court that will have a stepped fountain and hanging plants beneath high-tech skylights. Some wag will surely dub it “Deco-Babylonian.”

MOCA is a graceful chimera of glass pyramids, massive stone, a barrel vault on stilts and rather hip-looking green panels. Some irreverent upstart is bound to call it “Egypto-Romanesque-Hot-Rod.”

It is impossible to escape the feeling that the two sets of out-of-town architects have indulged in little wry architectural winks at the Southland’s stereotype as a lush oasis of stylish hedonism.

Yet the buildings may well turn out to be architectural masterpieces that serve art. Both have commodious and fairly neutral galleries. Clearly, however, they are being conditioned by the present climate of revived love of ornament and display.

Isozaki thinks that new museums lean to greater specialization rather than being repositories, such as the County Museum of Art. He alluded to a unique phenomenon in Japan where much of the lively blockbuster-style activity goes on in museums actually located in big department stores such as Seibu and Isetan. He laughed when asked whether American museums were tending to adopt the department store model.

‘Like a Department Store’

“Well, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has an escalator and big crowds and things are arranged on floors like ladies’ lingerie and books and so forth. It is a little like a department store.”

The popularization of the museums is making them more lively and attractive places to visit but their very success is packing galleries to such an extent that art requiring quiet study is nearly impossible to view.

“We have to work for balance,” Walker director Freidman said. “So far I think we are doing pretty well.”

All the same, the Barnum spirit is abroad in museums with a force unprecedented in living memory.