Critic Kramer Puts Armand Hammer Museum on the Critical List

Q & A: ART & MONEY

Art World talked with Hilton Kramer, the outspoken art critic and editor of the New Criterion, about documents casting the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, now under construction in Westwood, as a high-return business bonanza. Here is what Kramer had to say about the museum’s plans.

Q: What do you think of the idea of a museum being a large commercial success?

A: I find the whole thing absolutely hilarious. . . . In principle, it simply carries the commercialization and vulgarization of our art museums to a logical conclusion. And in practice, it’s a recipe for disaster. All it’s going to do is add another layer of vulgarity to the whole museum profession. . . . To open a museum with the idea of making it a flaming commercial enterprise is both repulsive in itself and quite unworkable.

Q: What do you think of wording in the business plan saying the museum “will quickly establish itself as one of the finest museums on the West Coast and in the country.”

A: It will not establish itself as one of the finest museums in the country. Whether it will establish itself as one of the finest museums on the West Coast or in Southern California is a rather smaller compass of comparison. That will depend entirely on what happens with the other institutions. But all I think it will do is add yet another problematical museum institution to the other institutions already in Southern California (referring to institutions such as LACMA, which he said is “saddled with wretched architecture”; the J. Paul Getty Museum, which he said came along “too late to put it in the running”; and The Norton Simon Museum, which he said “always seems to be in the danger of disappearing.”).

Q: What about the document’s plan to hire a museum director for $70,000 a year?

A: It’s preposterous to think of hiring a major museum director at only $70,000 a year. You’d almost have to pay the PR director that much. Of course in this institution, the PR director may be paid more than the museum director.

Q: What about the plan to employ no curatorial staff? Is that possible?

A: It is possible in the same way as having a doctor’s office without conducting tests is possible. To run a museum without a curatorial staff is to run the risk of being called a bogus operation. To say that you can run a museum without a curatorial staff is to say that you are running a museum without intelligence.

Q: Given the plans set for it, will the Armand Hammer Museum be successful?

A: I can’t imagine that it will succeed if the objective is to make a profit. What it will succeed at is making both itself and the California cultural scene the laughingstock of the country. I can see French and German television producing hilarious documentaries on such an institution--on what happens to art in the hands of obtuse Americans.

THE SCENE

Despite rumors floating in some circles that Marilyn Butler is thinking about closing down her Santa Monica Gallery, Butler told Art World that while closing her gallery is “always a possibility,” she hasn’t “done anything concrete so far.” Butler opened the gallery at 910 Colorado Ave. in November of 1988. “I have three galleries and I certainly don’t need all three of them,” Butler said, referring to her 12-year-old business in Scottsdale, Ariz., and 8-year-old gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. “But I haven’t made any decision one way or the other. It will depend on how far I can extend myself physically--how long I can keep going back and forth between the three. . . . Galleries are very personal businesses, so my decision will be based on that.”

Sixty museum membership directors from the U.S. and Canada are in town this week to attend the 11th annual Art Museum Membership Conference, which is being co-hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The conference, which runs through Tuesday, provides a forum for the directors to discuss issues of community participation and support.

OVERHEARD

A middle-aged man who stopped by to see “ ‘Success is a job in New York. . . . ‘ The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum just before it closed last week seemed to find Warhol’s early work much more representative and recognizable as “real art” than his later Pop Art. While in the museum’s gift store, the man asked the shop’s young female cashier if she had seen the show and if it had made her sad. “Sad?” the clerk replied quizzically. “Yes,” came back the man. “He could have been a great artist.”

CURRENTS:

The famous Rodin sculpture “The Three Shades” is on view through June 1 in the sculpture court of the Palm Springs Desert Museum. The work is a group of three male figures conceived by Auguste Rodin to grace the top of a set of monumental bronze doors commissioned in 1880 by the French government. Entitled “The Gates of Hell,” the doors were inspired by Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” The three figures, symbolizing fate, have their heads bowed from the weight of their destiny and express anguish, anxiety and resignation. Although Rodin never cast “The Gates of Hell” in total during his lifetime, he worked on it for two decades and used many parts of it in separate sculptures. In 1977, renowned contemporary Rodin collector B. Gerald Cantor commissioned the Coubertin Foundry outside of Paris to cast the entire “Gates of Hell,” which includes 180 separate figures. “The Three Shades,” which measures 75 inches-by-75 inches-by-42 inches, is on extended loan from the B. Gerald Cantor Collections.

DEBUTS

The first one-person show in Los Angeles of works by New York-based sculptor Ann Messner opens Saturday at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. Messner’s metal sculptures consist of fragments taken from the common yet complex objects that make up the modern urban environment. She has exhibited extensively in galleries on the East Coast and in Europe, and is perhaps best known for her outdoor public installations, including the 1987 piece, “Meteor,” at Times Square. Messner’s new sculptures will be at the gallery through April 28.

The first Los Angeles exhibition of work by Arizona-based painter Philip C. Curtis goes on view Saturday at Marilyn Butler Gallery. Curtis was born in Michigan in 1907, was trained at Yale University and served in the Army during World War II. Since his release from the Army, Curtis has lived in virtual isolation and has worked outside the mainstream, exhibiting primarily in U.S. and European museums such as the Phoenix Art Museum, which has a permanent display of his works in its foyer. The show runs through April 28.

Times Staff Writer Zan Dubin contributed to this column.