Taking the Public for a Spin

Like many of their brethren lately, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art have been actively seeking to expand their audiences beyond the core constituency of art aficionados.

LACMA has done it by emphasizing celebrity programming--Impressionism, Van Gogh, Egyptian art, etc. The familiar premise is that populist entertainment will subsidize more serious shows.

MOCA doesn’t have quite that luxury, given the estrangement a general audience feels from most contemporary art, so it has taken a different path. The museum has recently unveiled a million-dollar ad campaign, with print, television, billboard and bus card advertisements that promote the museum. The campaign, designed by TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, has itself been the subject of coverage in newspapers (including this one) and on the airwaves.

Feeling as I do that it is entirely possible to live a long, happy and productive life without ever seeing a painting or sculpture, I’ve never been one to proselytize for art. Attraction, not promotion, is the preferred methodology, given that attraction claims the most powerful life-altering potential. Ask yourself: Did you get more satisfaction dating whom your mother told you to date or dating whom you wanted to date?

It turns out, though, that there’s another, even more daunting pitfall in the difficult effort to attract new museum audiences. Art museums run the risk of alienating the audience they already have. A museum’s core constituency is willing to put up with a lot--but there are limits.

This occurred to me in the wake of MOCA’s ad campaign, and it was driven home when an announcement arrived in the mail of a hastily organized public panel discussion scheduled for tonight at 7:30 at LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures. Let’s take them one at a time.

“In haste but with great pleasure, the Institute is pleased to announce our next event--’Made in California: A Response,’ ” declares the LACMA flier, redundantly. The “Made in California” reference is to the mammoth current exhibition--the largest in the museum’s history--which purports to examine the relationship between the arts in California and the state’s evolving image over the last century. At the panel the museum “welcomes a discussion on the passionate response--positive, negative, but not indifferent--’Made in California’ has received. [We aim] to engage the much larger issues this show has helped foster, which include the predicament of museums and exhibitions today, the role of curators and the relationship between high art and visual culture.” (The bold emphasis, incidentally, is in the original.)

This is what, in Foggy Bottom, is called spin control. The exhibition “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” has been a critical bust. So LACMA claims the fiasco has “helped foster” various “much larger issues” that now demand keen debate--chitchat that will at least divert attention away from what a lousy show it is.

“Made in California” was supposed to have been, at least in part, the triumphant local art platform on which LACMA would proudly stand this spring to launch a regional campaign to raise several hundred-million dollars for a major expansion program. Oops. Time to make lemonade out of a lemon.

Enter “the controversial art exhibition.” With its last-minute panel, LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures is manufacturing controversy where there is none (or next to none) and then striding boldly into the pseudo-intellectual fray. With few exceptions, the actual response to the show has been fairly uniform. Most reviews have ranged from yawningly polite to sharply negative. A possible exception was Time’s Robert Hughes, a critic already long convinced that American culture is in steep decline, who found happy confirmation for his dyspepsia in the grim galleries at LACMA. A sample: “[The show] spends at least as much time and space on ephemera, from tourist brochures to labor pamphlets, as on certifiable masterpieces of art--which California has never produced in abundance anyhow.”

Thanks, Bob!

Tonight’s panel features two LACMA curators, the author of a well-known book on American museum practices, an artist included in “Made in California,” a local university student and a New York Times art critic who panned the show. That review fittingly chastised the “disastrous” exhibition’s “often overt hostility to art and the people who make it.” Notably, none of the three curators credited with overseeing the interdepartmental exhibition will be on the dais. Who can blame them?

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Meanwhile over at MOCA, the rumor mill has been grinding overtime. After the launch last month of the ad campaign to attract new visitors, the grumbling began. A negative (and cogent) review of the campaign published in LA Weekly was followed by the abrupt disappearance of MOCA’s ads from the pages of the alternative paper--and by whispered stories that the museum had pulled them in retaliation. MOCA flatly denies it, explaining that one cycle of ads had coincidentally ended and that another, keyed to an exhibition opening next month, will soon appear. LA Weekly did not return a telephone call requesting comment.

In black text on a white ground, MOCA’s new ads mimic wall labels found on works of art in a museum collection. Site-specific, the ads appropriate the neighborhood in which they appear, an adjacent building, a magazine or newspaper page or a nearby activity, which is said to be “on loan” from the Museum of Contemporary Art. “ ‘Decline of Culture’ (2001)” reads the label-cum-ad that has been running periodically on CNN and other cable television stations, followed by a list of materials--TV set, living room sofa--and the all-important lender identification.

The campaign, obviously derived from familiar ironic tropes of 1970s Conceptual art, gets into all kinds of embarrassing trouble. Take “ ‘Decline of Culture’ (2001).” Commercials often insult a viewer’s intelligence, but rarely do they do what this one does: insult the very activity in which the viewer is at that moment willingly engaged. And if watching TV does in fact represent a “decline of culture,” why is MOCA participating in the slide, especially while spending lots of its hard-won dollars?

Artists tell me they hate the MOCA ad campaign--as well they might. However many rules of ordinary advertising the campaign breaks, it also breaks a necessary institutional taboo: The museum, with its Conceptual commercials, appears to be usurping the role of artist.

And a bad artist at that.

Whether it’s the museum as artist-usurper in MOCA’s ad campaign, or the hostility to art and artists evident in LACMA’s “Made in California,” the current vigorous courting of a general public is coming at great expense. The art museums’ core constituency is suffering from serious alienation of affection.

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* “Made in California: A Response,” LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures, LACMA West Penthouse, Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue, 7:30 p.m. Free; reservations required: (323) 857-6088.