Playing to the Gallery

Whenever I think of the new Getty Center, which is fast approaching the first anniversary of its debut in a breathtaking setting on a ridge high above Brentwood, immediately I think of two things: art (which is good) and hassle (which isn’t). Going to the Getty during these last many months has turned out to offer boundless opportunities for satisfying artistic experiences; getting to the Getty has been a pain in the . . . well, neck.

The place is packed, but crowds per se are not the problem. Ease of access is.

As of late November, booking a convenient reservation to park your car in the Getty Center’s cavernous garage required a lead time of about six weeks. If, sometime in the vicinity of Thanksgiving, you had decided there was something you wanted to see at the museum or the research institute--a gorgeous selection of Flemish medieval manuscripts from the Getty’s exceptional permanent collection, let’s say, or a special show of surprising graphic designs by the great Russian avant-gardist El Lissitzky--you’d have to wait to satisfy your hunger until some time after New Year’s.

That, or grab the only available parking slot available in the next few days: a Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. That would mean braving rush hour in the already clotted Sepulveda Pass. It would also mean a rushed hour for your visit to the galleries, since the museum closes promptly at 7 on Tuesday nights.

Walk-ins and mass-transit riders are certainly welcome, but they face the possibility of long lines or, at an especially crowded time, even risk being turned away. Only a parking reservation guarantees admission to the tram for the slowly winding ascent up the hill.

So, a hassle.

Unlike most, the Getty is not a museum you visit lightly, when the mood for art moves you. You must instead plan ahead for your pleasure. Having long ago chosen to locate the center at an exceptionally difficult--if exceptionally beautiful--site, Getty Trust officials replicated, on a grander scale, the inherent problems at the old villa on the edge of Malibu. As with that much smaller predecessor, the Getty Center has made itself into an atypical creature--what I think of as an “event museum.”

What I mean by an event museum is not that the museum holds special events, like exhibitions, family festivals, music concerts, lectures and the like. Most museums do that. What I mean is that the process of going to the Getty is itself an event, an occurrence far outside the norm or way beyond the daily routine.

There’s something to be said for conceiving of an art museum in those terms. Architect Richard Meier’s much-discussed design of the Getty Center seems to hold that idea close. The event begins with a tram ride, which functions as a decompression chamber between the diffuse attention necessary to navigating the city and the acutely focused demands of looking at art. The grand staircase ascending from the tram’s arrival plaza--visually marred for most of the year by an ugly clutter of potted plants--is a traditional means for elevating (literally and metaphorically) both an art museum and the museum experience. The clustered sequence of separate gallery pavilions, with glazed corridors and covered walkways between them, interweaves the lovely galleries with the outdoors, offering welcome moments of respite and refreshment.

The success of any museum-as-event, however, demands a careful balancing act. Art is not the norm in daily life, and it cannot be productively approached as just another artifact stumbled upon in the routine ebb and flow of things. On the other hand, neither is art comfortably situated on an inaccessible pedestal, as some inert trophy requiring genuflection. The Getty’s arduous hilltop site turns out to tip the balance far in one direction--too far, I fear, to allow it to function as something more than an event museum.

So spectacular is this particular event that its conception was plainly aimed at luring general audiences--who, it was no doubt feared, otherwise wouldn’t come. Dedicated art audiences, who would clamber down a dank rabbit hole with a flashlight if they knew Fra Bartolommeo’s “Holy Family” could be seen at the bottom, are taken for granted. They’ll come anyhow. Sensing this, dedicated art audiences who live in L.A., rather than those who voyage here and incorporate a visit to the Getty Center as part of the larger event called travel, can be forgiven if they feel going to the Getty is a hassle.

In its inaugural year, the Getty Center has emerged as a place that feels as if it’s meant for tourists and general audiences. The exaggerated quality of eventfulness is what causes many observers to liken the place--shallowly, I think--to Disneyland or Universal Studios. Indeed, a pointed effort to overcome the near bombast of the event--to ratchet down the overwhelming scale into something more intimate and human, while still managing to dazzle--seems to be the fulcrum for artist Robert Irwin’s remarkable, largely successful design for the Central Garden.

In the south-facing ravine that separates the museum and the research institute, Irwin engineered a wonderfully subversive garden path. Crowds can sometimes be a problem on the narrow walkways, but the garden has bigger things on its mind than throngs.

Despite all those epic, look-at-me! hilltop views sweeping from the Pacific Ocean eastward across the Los Angeles Basin all the way to the mountains beyond downtown, the zig-zag garden path brings you slowly, inexorably down inside a shallow, enclosed, bowl-like space. Irwin leaves you at the bottom of his own “L.A. basin” to explore the lush, chromatically exuberant, impossibly diverse flora he’s planted in such unanticipated abundance. There you contemplate an illusionistically floating azalea maze--which can be entered only by your imagination, not by your body--while your back is resolutely turned to the now-forgotten panoramic vista.

How extraordinary! In the face of an overpowering museum event, an artist leads you back to its reason for being. He leads you back to art.

El Nin~o rains early in the year pushed the garden’s growth into unexpected high gear, filling in the trees and plantings at an accelerated rate. Much of the resonance of Irwin’s wonderful garden, though, lies in the simple fact that a living artist made it. Together with a fine monumental painting by the peerless Edward Ruscha, commissioned for the lobby of the Harold O. Williams Auditorium, and an extravagantly lovely, wickedly funny installation of murals and collages in the restaurant by the redoubtable Alexis Smith, the presence of major new art by important artists who have been working in Los Angeles for as much as 40 years brings the event museum back to first purposes. The real event is not the Getty, the Getty Center or the Getty Center site--the real event is art.

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Although nothing’s been announced, rumors have been floating around that additional works will be commissioned for the site. Keep your fingers crossed. Anything that shifts the focus away from the museum event and toward the art event should get our unqualified support.

That includes the recent high-profile announcement that the Getty has acquired a historically important painting by Monet, which dates to the moment Impressionist painting was crystallizing in France. It’s the first such major acquisition in a very long time. The museum’s collection has come a long way in the last dozen years, but make no mistake: It still has a long way to go. Whatever else the far-flung Getty Trust does, upgrading and refining the museum’s collection should always remain its highest priority.

Since an event museum is geared toward attracting a generalized public, rather than an already dedicated audience for art, it’s natural to ask: Who has been the audience in the Getty’s inaugural year? Are they mostly locals, or mostly tourists? What’s the incidence of repeat visits? The demographic breakdown? Do the visitors differ in significant ways from those--mostly tourists, mostly white--who patronized the original Getty villa at Malibu, before it closed last year for renovation?

Some answers might be provided late in 1999, when the results of a visitor survey from the first 12 months are compiled and analyzed. The profile might be somewhat skewed, simply because it’s based on the opening year of one of the most heavily publicized cultural institutions in the world. Right now all we know is that people are coming in droves--closing in on 2 million for 1998, way ahead of the 1.2 million projected before the opening.

Also somewhat atypical because of inaugural year festivities has been the program. The special exhibition galleries have been occupied by a disappointing presentation, “Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence,” which attempted to use the museum’s collections of Greek and Roman art as “evidence” explaining the hydra-headed activities in conservation, research, education and so forth of the new Getty Center.

As a friend observed, it was hard to imagine anyone, anywhere, burbling with uncontained excitement to a pal, “Hey! Let’s go up to the Getty! I hear they’ve got some great evidence up there!” The navel-gazing focus on educating the audience about the Getty (yawn) came at the costly expense of its most important function: creating a public platform for significant artistic experiences.

In April we’ll begin to see just what kinds of art exhibitions the new Getty is really capable of hosting. “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara,” several years in the making (and a collaboration with New York’s Metropolitan Museum and several Italian cultural organizations), will be the first show ever to survey the often peculiar work of the elaborately talented 16th century artist. Prominent among the 50 pictures will be two outstanding works from the Getty’s own collection.

Needless to say, a Dosso retrospective isn’t likely to be much of a drawing card for general audiences. Yet, it’s exactly the kind of thing that--at least in conception, and hopefully in execution--will make the hassle that’s built into going to the Getty recede from the foreground. Tram rides, jaw-dropping vistas, family festivals and the rest are nice. Still, the best museum event is always an art event.