Los Angeles: Perfect Place for Curators to Meet? : Art: Big business and geopolitical upheaval are altering the concept of what museums should be. Attendees of a global conference say L.A. symbolizes that change.

It’s the perfect year for the International Committee of Modern Art Museums to convene in Los Angeles, according to Margit Rowell, president of the organization, which wound up its 25th annual meeting over the weekend.

About 85 members, representing modern and contemporary art institutions from around the world, spent last week here, attending lecture sessions at Loew’s Hotel in Santa Monica and visiting museums and private collections in Southern California.

“This is a time of enormous change in the museum world, and Los Angeles is the extreme point of how things are changing--on a grand scale,” said Rowell, curator for special projects at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. “Many of our members have a 19th-Century idea of what a museum should be: a collector and caretaker of art objects and a guardian of national patrimony. But these functions are being appropriated by private and commercial entities, and boards of trustees are pushing for popular, money-making exhibitions.

“Museums have to question what they should be doing--if they can continue to collect or if they should concentrate on exhibitions. Los Angeles--with its wealth of public and private museums, corporate collections and private foundations--is the perfect place for us to confront these issues very openly,” she said.

Facing such troublesome issues is a profound change for the international group. “In the old days, the organization was sort of a club. The models were the great museum directors, and the rest of us came to annual conferences to get inspiration from them,” Rowell said. “But then the meetings became much more pragmatic, dealing with such practical matters as insurance, finances and ethics. The organization was more important for the kind of exchanges that happened between meetings than for the actual meetings.”

Determined that this year would be different, Rowell and other officers decided to plan a more philosophical program that would stir up discussion and possibly help members to solve professional problems.

During a tightly scheduled week--including scholarly presentations, visits to Los Angeles museums and private collections, full-day trips to Santa Barbara and Orange County and meals at Los Angeles’ top restaurants--participants would attend lecture programs at the hotel and continue discussions informally during meals and on bus trips.

By Thursday morning, when the group convened for a session on “Enlightened Patronage,” the plan appeared to be proceeding successfully. “It’s the best meeting we’ve had in 10 years,” Rowell said.

“The conference has been brilliantly organized. We will leave California with a deep sense of having really felt this blossoming, flourishing culture. It’s powerful, sure, extremely creative and rich,” said Irina Subotic, of Yugoslavia’s State Museum in Belgrade. The only problem, Subotic said, is that “everything I see is so different from my country that I can’t adapt to it. I can just enjoy the spectacle and go home and think about it.”

The group’s collective thinking process began with a weighty session on “Perspectives on the State of Culture at the End of the 20th Century.” David Elliot, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, challenged museums to “regroup themselves if they are to justify their survival.” He asked art historians “to take in the massive cultural, social and political changes which are taking place in Russia, Central Europe, Southern Africa and other parts of the globe.”

He also urged his audience to reconsider the issue of quality, taking into account the diverse systems of judging value that exist around the world.

Also pointing to serious problems, New York critic Rosalind Krauss delivered a scathing attack on what she calls “the late capitalist museum”--an increasingly industrialized, constantly expanding institution that is geared to a mass market. This voracious museum requires ever larger inventories of art assets, more physical outlets to sell its product, and new means of leveraging collections, she said.

Some of these issues recurred during Thursday’s program on “Enlightened Patronage,” concerning the American way of private funding for the arts. Speakers were from Citicorp, the Rockefeller Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, all of whom provided major funding for the conference. Jennifer Vorbach and Kevin Buchanan, of Citibank’s Art Advisory Service in New York, explained how the bank’s art advisers act as “eyes and ears” for wealthy collectors who are too busy to track down new acquisitions. “The enormous growth of private wealth worldwide” accounts for the success of the service, which was founded in 1979, Buchanan said.

Citibank also offers a credit service that accepts art as collateral on loans. The service is generally used by collectors, but the artist Christo in 1983 put up some of his work as collateral for a loan on “Surrounded Islands,” a huge project in which he floated pink fabric around islands in Biscayne Bay.

Alberta Arthurs, director for arts and humanities of the Rockefeller Foundation, presented an overview of the foundation’s efforts to help museums research and present non-Western and American minority art, including the current “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985” at UCLA.

Finally, five speakers from the J. Paul Getty Trust offered insights into the complexities of trust programs dedicated to collecting, conservation, documentation, scholarship and elementary art education.

The talk and display of private wealth turned off some participants. “After seeing all the wealth of California, I will go back to my poor house and my poor museum in my poor country, but I will feel that I am quite rich,” said Frits Bless, of the Van Reekum Museum in Apeldoorin, the Netherlands. “I feel quite a lot of emptiness here. I’m glad I don’t have to work with people who do things for show and don’t really know what’s going on.”

Other participants seemed unperturbed by money that was unlikely to benefit their institutions. “It helps me to understand how things are done here and to work with museums here in the future,” said Norbert Nobis, deputy director of the Springel Museum in Hanover, West Germany.

“No one came here thinking they would not see a wealthy city. Rich people are involved with art everywhere, even in Panama,” said Monika Kupfer, adjunct curator of Contemporary Art Museum in Panama.

This was the first visit to Los Angeles for many participants, some of whom gave the city rave reviews. “This conference is special because it is in Los Angeles. There’s so much going on here, more than in New York. I knew this was a big, big city, but I didn’t know how big,” Nobis said.

The best part of the conference for Kupfer was that she had an opportunity to meet and work with far-flung South and Central American colleagues, all of whom were brought to Los Angeles by the Rockefeller Foundation.

“This is the United Nations of culture, although a lot of countries are missing. The conference is as much about international relations and politics as it is about culture,” Kupfer said. “The wonderful thing for someone who comes from a disorganized country is that everything works. The buses come on time, the meals are on time and they are always good, the private collectors are gracious, the programs are well-organized. That leaves us free to spend all our time meeting people and talking about how we can work together on exhibitions in the future.”