COMMENTARY : Don’t Forget the Art Part : Yes, LACMA’s new director should have fund-raising and business smarts. But far more important is the ‘vision thing,’ a commitment to art--coupled with the ability to make that passion infectious

The search for a capable and compelling director to head the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--a post that has been vacant for more than seven months--began in earnest in February and isn’t expected to be completed at least until late summer. The search will be arduous.

LACMA faces crucial questions as its search begins to pick up steam. What kind of person is needed in the director’s office at this critical juncture in the museum’s still-youthful history? Of the qualities an ideal candidate can be hoped to possess, which are essential and which merely desirable?

A committee of more than a dozen trustees, chaired by president-designate William Mingst, began to deliberate those questions in earnest at its first meeting on Feb. 9. Providing professional input into the discussions are two ranking LACMA staff members: Stephanie Barron, senior curator of 20th-Century art and acting coordinator of curatorial affairs, and Ron Bratton, deputy director for administration.

In addition, the committee has invited consultative help from John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Steven Lavine, president of the California Institute of the Arts. Korn Ferry International, the well-known corporate headhunting firm, has also been retained.

To determine what qualities the museum should look for in a director means first figuring out what the museum currently lacks. And what it lacks is no small matter: Any new director must be capable of finding a convincing, coherent, imaginative focus for the sprawling institution.

LACMA is a big, complicated compendium of works of art from dozens of cultures and scores of historical periods. The director’s most important task will be to shape the collections and programs into an invigorating artistic image that seems integral to the unique rhythm of Los Angeles, one that is both local in its commitments and international in its appetites. For the museum can’t claim to offer such a profile now.

LACMA has always loosely described itself as “a West Coast Met,” the California counterpart to New York’s imposing Metropolitan Museum of Art. When it opened its doors on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965, the museum noted with pride that it had the most floor space of any museum built since the Met. The pointed comparison spoke of a bracing sense of ambition and reflected the brashness of the upstart city.

The museum’s strategic planning committee reaffirmed the analogy as recently as 1992, but it’s time to face facts: The goal was unachievable. LACMA has many proud strengths and ranks among the finest museums in the nation, but it doesn’t possess the staggering depth and breadth of an encyclopedic institution like the Met.

Nor will it. It’s just too late in the museum-game.

The point is: That’s OK. A late-19th-Century, European model for a globally encyclopedic treasure-house, which is what the Met is, might once have been a useful dream. But it’s not the only option. The problem comes in clinging to an obsolete aspiration, for it sets up the institution as eternally bound to fail.

Neither can LACMA easily assume the role traditionally occupied by civic museums in smaller American cities such as Seattle, Denver, Atlanta or St. Louis. Unlike most of those, the County Museum is far from the only art game of major consequence in town. The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the Norton Simon Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art are all institutions of enviable stature. What can LACMA do that they cannot?

The answer isn’t simply to divvy up turf. LACMA shouldn’t disengage from, say, the art of the present just because there’s a Museum of Contemporary Art a few miles away, any more than it should abandon Baroque painting because of the Simon or the Getty. How a museum interprets art is at least as critical to establishing its distinctive profile as the kind of art it interprets. The “how” gives the institution its character.

Think of it this way: A museum is engaged in “selling” itself to a wildly variegated public, and the product it “sells” is made by the staff. (Yes, artists make the art, but curators and directors make museums.) So the single most crucial qualification for a successful art museum director is neither fund-raising capacity, nor advanced business skills, nor faceless managerial talents. Most important is the director’s commitment to art.

Indeed, in order to have a museum product really worth offering, good business means having a director whose chief skills concern art.

That means someone with more than a general enthusiasm or pedantic admiration for art. It requires that inexplicable consanguinity with art’s soul, a gut-level empathy that resides in the solar plexus. What style this passion takes doesn’t much matter, whether hyper-active or more low-key and deliberate. It does matter that it’s deep and unshakable.

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It also matters that it be coupled with another rare talent, which is the ability to make that passion infectious. A great director harnesses latent energies among curatorial staff, board members and an interested public, diverse constituencies who must be roused to action. Far more difficult to find in a single person than are most necessary skills, too often the twin qualities of artistic passion and the skill to spread it around are taken for granted in prospective candidates.

They should be at the top of the search committee’s inventory of essential qualifications if LACMA is to right its listing ship. For despite the remarkable growth of the young institution’s collections and its impressive track record of exhibitions, both large and small, no one is quite sure just where LACMA fits within the museum cosmos today. Adrift, it doesn’t sport a public face that meshes with--and gives shape to--the distinctive dynamic of the community in which it resides.

That can only happen if trustees can be sufficiently energized to follow a director’s challenging lead. One crucial job for any museum’s director, which the public rarely sees, is showing sluggish, uninvolved board members--of which LACMA unfortunately has its share--just what a flat-out pleasure it can be to be a trustee of a major art museum.

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It would seem to go without saying that a museum needs both an artistically imaginative director with the capacity to stimulate multiple constituencies, as well as a board cognizant of its obligation to support the leadership of the professional staff in this central task. When you think about it, though, LACMA has only fitfully possessed this crucial mix during its three decades on Wilshire Boulevard.

When Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III became LACMA’s third director in 1980, his infectious enthusiasm for the institution merged with the gathering energies of the high-flying decade ahead. He was met by a board eager to expand the physical plant, to support a stepped-up program of high-profile exhibitions and to increase the museum’s operating budget in the process.

Powell and his board succeeded grandly in taking the institution to the next level of national and international respectability. Together they showed what heights could be reached when board and director are in sync.

But here’s the big difference between the director’s search that snared Powell in 1980 and the one today: Then, the board knew exactly what it wanted the museum to become, and they hired a director to carry out the plan; in 1994, they’re not so sure.

Today’s board is plainly aware of the pressing problem with “the vision thing.” At a daylong retreat on Dec. 4, 29 trustees gathered in a hotel conference room in Santa Monica for wide-ranging discussions about the museum’s future. First among the topics was the pressing absence of a common agreement among the board as to what LACMA’s mission should be.

Recognizing a problem is half the battle, and the board is wise to face the issue squarely. Yet, the solution they proposed is disturbing: They created a task force to identify a desired profile for LACMA, which, it was agreed, would be critical in the recruitment of a new director.

Alas, the board got it backward. The cart was hitched before the horse.

Forging an internal artistic coherence for the museum, especially within a dynamically evolving city, is a director’s job. As the Powell example showed, a director does best when a clear mandate from the board is there to be filled, but the charge is not so simple. The new director must be given a daring mandate to invent a powerful, coherent artistic vision for an institution now lacking one.

Preconceptions of the museum’s role ought to be erased, not itemized; whatever consensus might have been forged should be abandoned. (Consensus usually means whatever the more powerful have gotten the less powerful to agree to.) It’s tabula rasa time.

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LACMA needs an imaginative director skilled in art who, marshaling the talents of a gifted curatorial staff, can assess the museum and the city, then guide the board through the critical task of developing a coherent mission.

Discussions of the landmark May Co. site next to the museum, which LACMA acquired earlier this year, have also put the cart before the horse. Trustees, with staff input, have been busily trying to fashion a workable scheme for programming the expanded site. A development so crucial, however, ought to come after the new director has been selected, not before. The fate of the May Co. site and the plan for a surrounding sculpture garden must be integral to developing an institutional profile.

Ironically, the current absence of a clearly agreed-upon mission can be an asset, not a hindrance, for the search committee. It presents a golden opportunity for the difficult prospect of attracting a new director. For what imaginative candidate would not be seized by the chance to reinvent a museum--especially one with LACMA’s estimable resources?

LACMA is a first-class museum with a solid track record. Financially, it appears on the way to recovery, while optimistic signs for the California economy also bode well. Because of all the turmoil of the past 20 months--staff defections, a slashed budget, shortened public hours--the museum is going to have to sell itself to prospective candidates for the job.

In the search for a new director, the board ought to telegraph three things to candidates: its awareness of the current absence of a coherent, galvanizing mission; its sincere desire for a new director to lead them in shaping a creative and imaginative response to the dilemma; and its eager commitment to support on every level the profile that develops.

The search for a director still won’t be easy, because the task is large and the obstacles high. But such a pitch can also be mightily enticing to the right candidate. After all, for an imaginative individual with the necessary mix of drive and artistic insight, this job can be a career-maker.*