New Getty Attracting the World’s Attention

Whether it’s the golden name of Getty, the $1-billion price tag, the stardust of its proximity to the coming millennium or the chance to weigh in on whether Los Angeles has finally come of age as a cultural mecca, the Dec. 16 opening of the new Getty Center is being heralded by the media as an arts phenomenon second to none.

Certainly for sheer numbers of visiting journalists, other cultural events in recent Los Angeles history dwarf the cadre of 600 media representatives expected to troop to Brentwood for the museum’s three-day press preview before the opening. Each year, Los Angeles’ biggest Hollywood event, the Academy Awards, draws a press corps of about 1,200 to Los Angeles; the 1984 Olympics Games drew 7,000 news representatives to the city.

But in the world of the arts, the number of expected press visitors as well as the countless others who have already visited the Richard Meier-designed Getty complex in various stages of construction is nothing short of astonishing, as is the word count on the articles already printed all over the world during the year leading up to the opening.

There’s architecture in the air. Getty watchers observe that October’s opening of the architect Frank Gehry’s branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which caused some 400 visiting critics and writers to drool with admiration, has increased interest and raised the stakes for the Getty.

Mary Abbe, art critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, notes that J. Paul Getty was born in Minneapolis--in fact, she describes Getty’s original home as a “sort of derelict Scottish Revival building” not far from the newspaper’s offices. The Getty opening, she notes, was one event that did not require wheedling travel dollars out of her editors by stressing the local angle. “It’s just a cultural behemoth of such scale that you really have to cover it,” she points out.

Whether winning flashy recognition in the spate of recent features in Time, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Newsweek or sharing space with motor-home advertisements in Ventura-based Trailer Life magazine (“Our audience is 55 or older, with a lot of free time, and museum openings are of great interest to them,” says magazine editor Millie Evans of her highly mobile readership), the opening of the Getty Center is drawing attention from all corners of the globe, and its eclectic offerings have drawn an equally diverse media contingent.

Journalists arriving for Getty press days must submit social security numbers and ID photos for credentials--standard procedure for sporting events and rock concerts but highly unusual in the arts. Getty officials say they are doing this because the press will have access to areas ordinarily off limits to the public.

In addition to art and architecture writers, Getty spokespersons say that travel, garden, education, high technology, archeology, science and even food writers have visited the Getty. In early September, the Getty Museum shut down installation of its artworks to accommodate specialized photography.

Although many correspondents from faraway lands have dropped by in recent months, the Getty expects a more local crowd in December, along with L.A.-based representatives of national and international publications. That’s by design, says Lori Starr, the Getty Center’s director of public affairs. “Sure, this is an international story, but we put a special emphasis on local press . . . to get out a message of welcome and invitation for people who live in Los Angeles, that this is their place,” she says.

In conjunction with the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, there are plans to take busloads of journalists on arts tours which may include downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Wilshire Boulevard’s “Museum Row”--including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--the California Afro-American Museum, Little Tokyo’s Japanese American National Museum, and Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station and other nearby galleries.

Although most local spots plan no special exhibitions for the visitors, Santa Monica’s Eli Broad Family Foundation plans to court the press by installing its building with significant Broad holdings of contemporary art. The collection is not open to the public.

Certainly numbers account for some of the current love affair between the press and the Getty: A “$1-billion” complex with a $4.2-billion endowment built of 250,000 blocks of travertine marble is a juicy story.

“Of course, it will be an event, because the Getty is, first, the wealthiest art institution in the world,” says Jean Loup Sense, Los Angeles bureau chief for the international wire service Agence France-Presse.

But it’s not just a money story. “It’s not just the billion dollars, it’s not just the opening of a major museum,” offers New Yorker writer Kurt Andersen, who posed the question: “Is the new Getty too good for L.A.?” in the magazine’s Sept. 29 issue. “It’s the way the money is being spent at this moment, when there aren’t giant pots of money around for the arts.”

Andersen adds that the Getty would be less interesting if didn’t happen to be in Los Angeles, a city some New York pundits still consider relatively culture-free. “The world, and especially people in New York, have a caricature view of Los Angeles that they would just as soon maintain,” he says. “When something like this comes along, that is so antithetical to the caricature in many ways, that becomes interesting, too.”

Indeed, Los Angeles’ cultural coming-of-age is questioned by the national press approximately once a decade, each time triggered by the opening of an expensive new arts institution. While the Getty is by far the biggest in terms of dollars, longtime arts publicist Barbara Kraft recalls some 700 to 800 journalists arriving here in 1986 for the concurrent opening of MOCA and the Roy O. Anderson wing of the Los Angeles County Museum. “Contemporary art was very much at the apex of everybody’s mind at that time; the art market was incredibly hot in 1986,” she observes. Before that, Kraft recalls, the opening of the Los Angeles Music Center caused a similar flurry of articles trumpeting the cultural adolescence of Los Angeles.

“And it will probably happen again 10 years from now with the opening of Frank Gehry’s music hall,” quipped the New Yorker’s Andersen, referring to the downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall project. The unbuilt hall, designed by Gehry, is now projected to open its doors in 2001 but has been subject to seemingly endless delays.

Although the U.S. media may be obsessed with L.A.’s cultural face-off with New York, the argument is virtually lost on readers in other countries, admits John Hiscock, West Coast correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. To England, the Getty is merely Somewhere in America. “England has difficulty distinguishing between the East Coast and the West Coast,” he says.