For Getty, No Decision Is Too Big--or Too Little

With the Getty Center it’s hard not to speak in hyperbole. Big budget--$1 billion for the new hilltop cultural complex. Big site--110 acres. Spectacular purchases for the museum’s collection--$22.5 million for a High Renaissance masterpiece by Fra Bartolommeo, $26 million for a Poussin landscape, $25 million for a Cezanne still life--and that’s just in the past year. No nonprofit arts institution in the world can equal its resources or ambition.

But that doesn’t mean the Getty doesn’t think little too. If ever an institution could be characterized by its obsession with details, its agonizing over how to do everything just right, it’s the Getty. Six months until its inaugural day, the Brentwood center has finally set its public opening date--Dec. 16--which it will announce at a luncheon Monday in New York for the international press. Getty officials also have only just established how the public will be able to get in--a simple phone system for parking reservations.

What took so long? As with everything the Getty does, officials explored every possible date and option. Because it has resources that no other institution could dream of, the Getty seems to have no limits on its ability to look inward and try to perfect itself. So staff members are spending a lot of time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. And if in the end they come up with just another wheel, it’s not for lack of trying.

The long-awaited opening date of the Getty Center was pushed later and later into the fall to ensure that the enormously complicated project would be in perfect order. Around the first of the year, the inaugural weekend was announced for Dec. 6-7. But when Getty officials learned that the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors--an annual award program for performing artists, attended by many art world dignitaries--was slated for Dec. 7 in Washington, they had second thoughts. To avoid making their invited guests--among them President Clinton--choose between Los Angeles and Washington, Getty officials rescheduled their invitational weekend celebration to Dec. 13-14.

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Although that decision was intended to accommodate some of the Getty’s most exalted guests, far greater efforts are being extended to serve the public. The first day’s invitational affair will include more than powerhouse arts leaders, celebrities and political figures. It will be attended by representatives of community groups. The second day, Dec. 14, will be the first in a series of family festivals. Indeed, a populist philosophy governs the Getty Center’s public facilities and programs, and it is being implemented assiduously.

Call it civic responsibility, noblesse oblige or a severe case of institutional self-consciousness, accessibility has become the Getty’s watchword as it prepares to greet the world in its splendid new home. The philosophy is particularly visible at the new museum, the primary public facility of the Getty Center, but it penetrates the entire campus, which houses trust offices, a grant program and specialized institutes.

Take the issue of crowd control. Getty officials were afraid that if they just opened the doors on their first public day, there would be a disastrous mob scene, a traffic jam that could tie up the 405 Freeway for hours and a public relations catastrophe.

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But in controlling attendance, they didn’t want the new cultural complex to appear to be the exclusive province of insiders. An overly restrictive approach would reinforce the Getty’s elitist image at the very moment the trust is promoting its new home as an arts center for the entire city.

Faced with that dilemma, many event organizers would have turned to Ticketmaster. Not the Getty.

After months of reviewing the experiences and attendance patterns of other new institutions, factoring in projections for Los Angeles’ audience and assessing the track record of its museum in Malibu, the Getty devised a temporary parking reservation system. It is intended to operate for a year or so until the furor subsides, when it will be discontinued.

But how could everyone get an equal crack at it? This too required painstaking study. The Getty Center is well equipped with state-of-the-art communications devices, so electronic methods were considered. But the old-fashioned telephone got the nod because more people have phones than computers and the Getty wanted to retain the personal touch of its parking reservation system at Malibu.

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Only 1,200 parking spaces are allotted to visitors at the Getty Center, but those who don’t bring a car don’t need a reservation. Callers who can’t bear to wait for a parking reservation will be advised to take a bus--MTA Lines 233 and 561--or a taxi.

The next sticky issue was selecting the day of the week to launch the system. Sunday won because it provides most working people and the leisure class equal access. Commercial tour operators, nonprofit organizations and community groups, which generally do business on weekdays, will get their first chance to make reservations on a Monday. The first reservations for groups will be taken at 9 a.m. Sept. 8; general parking reservations will begin at 9 a.m. Sept. 28.

Attracting the desired mix of visitors involves more than creating a democratic reservations system. On the one hand, thousands of people are impatiently awaiting an opportunity to visit, and they must be informed about the parking reservation system and persuaded that it’s good for them. The Getty hopes to accomplish that in public service announcements and advertising, beginning in August.

Broadening the audience is far more difficult. For starters, the Getty plans to strengthen relationships already established with schools and community organizations by inviting them to visit the new center before the December opening. Information packets are being prepared for churches, schools and neighborhood groups.

“There are a lot of people out there in our community--in fact I think a clear majority, and not only those who are ethnically diverse but a lot of Anglos--who lack any form of art education and may have never been to a museum in their lives,” said Harold M. Williams, president of the Getty Trust. “That’s Los Angeles. If the Getty is to be relevant to Los Angeles and be part of its culture, it can’t just live on those who are already our visitors.”

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When they arrive, few will have a clue as to how much effort has gone into trying to make their experience painlessly educational and, preferably, enjoyable.

More than a decade of work at the Getty’s museum in Malibu, including focus groups, quarterly visitor surveys, pilot programs and the creation of new educational materials, has gone into the design of four information centers at the new museum. An activity room devoted to families was shaped with the help of family and child advocates.

Even the menu in the center’s cafe--which offers family-friendly items such as hamburgers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, as well as designer salads--evolved through Getty-specific research. The Getty conducted a survey of its staff, whose eating habits were thought to represent a cross-section of visitors. But that wasn’t the last word. When the very people who had requested healthful foods were first in line on Grill Days, menu planners upped the cafe’s grease quotient.

Elsewhere on the sprawling campus, the once remote Research Institute will become much more accessible when its collections are taken out of storage and installed in its new building. Exhibitions will be mounted in a gallery, and librarians will handle art-related research requests from the public and even grant one-day privileges for drop-in researchers. The Education Institute’s work with public school art programs will be visible in colorful banners representing all 50 states, to be installed at the center Nov. 14, as the culmination of a two-year, nationwide project, “Wave Your Banner! Exploring Community Through Art.”

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The Getty Trust Publications Department’s efforts can be seen in an astonishingly long list of 34 new books on Getty collections and programs, to be available in the museum bookshop and elsewhere.

At the museum, where most visitors will spend the bulk of their time, they will enter a glass hall opening onto a courtyard surrounded by five pavilions.

“The idea is pretty simple, something all of us arrived at 12 years ago,” museum Director John Walsh said. “One part of it was to build a museum that put works of art in a really flattering setting. Another part was to give people an opportunity to look at art and then do something else: relax, see the view, sit down, have a cup of coffee. We also believe people enjoy more and remember more about works of art if they are able to learn something about them.”

The museum was designed to embody the notion of choice in response to surveys of visitors to the Malibu museum, Walsh said. The reception area reveals optional paths to the permanent collection and exhibitions. Furthermore, the museum’s five pavilions are called East, West, North, South and Temporary--the latter for special exhibitions--instead of being identified by numbers, which would have suggested a preferred course through the galleries.

“We have gained respect for visitors who don’t come to a museum with the idea they are visiting a school or library, but as if they are going to a park,” Walsh said. “That train of thought is disillusioning to those who think museums are good for people. But the language of this museum is come and wander, not get aboard. Browse the collections. Make up your own route.”

Associate director and chief curator Deborah Gribbon goes so far as to say: “This building is for the public, it isn’t for the art. If it was for the art, we could have built a big black box.”

But purists needn’t worry. She and the rest of the museum staff are making enormous efforts to present the collection so that it will be seen to its best advantage by both scholars and casual visitors.

No detail or option at the Getty ever will be completely left to chance, and there always will be a lofty, idealistic intention. “The purpose of all this psychology is to make people more attentive,” Walsh said. “People with limited time are easily distracted and upset if they don’t know how to use their time wisely. The more they can be put at ease and feel in control, the more attentive they are.”