Reflecting on an Altered Landscape

A few days after the resignation of Getty Museum Director Deborah Gribbon, members of the Los Angeles arts community -- Southland gallery owners, art professors and artists themselves -- expressed a range of emotions, from concern and confusion to utter indifference totrouble at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“It’s a major deal,” said photographer Douglas Busch, who sold his portfolio to the Getty in the late 1990s. “It’s resonating all over the world right now. Deborah has left because the collection is no longer the mission. Deborah was really committed to collecting, displaying and interpreting, which should be the mission of any museum.”

Busch recently returned from Britain and Germany, where he said the Getty was the topic of many conversations, most of them critical of the institution. “The curators I’ve been talking to have been applauding” Gribbon, he said.

Some say they had been following reports of turmoil for years. “I’ve been aware of it for some time,” said Rosamund Felsen, owner of the Bergamot Station gallery of the same name and the mother of a former Getty employee. “I think it’s good that it’s getting aired.”

Robert Shapazian, director of the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, sees the problems as built into the very structure of the place. “The Getty has had ongoing problems since its inception,” he said. “The priorities of the Getty have always been argued by one faction or the other -- even under the term of Deborah Gribbon. It’s a big institution; it’s got a lot of parts. It’s a multi-armed institution. So it’s always up for grabs.”

Artist Marc Pally said he thought the scuffle at the Getty was a symptom of a larger problem stemming from its location. “I can never get over the fact that the Getty has so profoundly isolated itself from the city of Los Angeles. It’s a gated community, essentially. I don’t take this as an isolated, internal squabble; it has a conflicted agenda.”

Others were taken by surprise. “It shocked me,” said Craig Krull of the photography-oriented Craig Krull Gallery. “I had no idea anything like that was happening up there. Everybody has been throwing their hands up in shock. It’s such a great institution. I do a lot of business with them. I don’t know if my current working relationship with them will continue. I’m sorry to see [Gribbon] go.”

Several dealers and artists, especially those who work through contemporary galleries, emphasized and even lamented the distance they feel from the museum on the hill. “The Getty and I have very little to do with each other,” said Sean Caley Regen of Regen Projects in West Hollywood. “And I think that’s a shame.”

Tim Blum, of the Blum and Poe gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, said he was “not at all” concerned about developments at the Getty. “We’re into contemporary art -- they don’t even come up in conversation. They’re so off the radar for us.”

Photographer Uta Barth, who teaches at UC Riverside and was part of a show of commissioned new work at the Getty in 2000, also criticized the museum’s lack of interest in contemporary work. “The show I was in was a gesture to engage the contemporary art community,” she said. “But it was a onetime deal, and that was the end of it.”

Marsea Goldberg, of the cutting-edge New Image Art Gallery on Fairfax, emphasized that she had not, as of Thursday afternoon, heard about the trouble there and that it did not especially interest her.

One artist, Venice-based painter Renee Petropoulos, stood up for the Getty Research Institute, an institutional wing that hosts conferences and seminars, and which some critics contend has eclipsed the museum. “Its access to world scholars and ability to bring conversation to the production and history of art is really crucial,” said Petropoulos, who teaches at the Otis Institute of Art and Design. “And I find I take my students there -- its archives are esoteric and unusual.”

But while others said the changes would not make much tangible difference in their working lives, they were troubled by the developments.

“I’m concerned because so many good people are leaving,” said gallery owner Margo Leavin, who said her professional life would not change. “It’s just not the same place, and the mood is totally different. The art just doesn’t seem to be the most important thing there.”

“There are a lot of layers to the Los Angeles art world, and in some ways the Getty and Chinatown are light years apart from each other -- even galaxies,” said Parker Jones, co-owner of the Black Dragon Society gallery. “But at the same time, every gallerist is concerned about the stability of the main institutions in town.”

The Getty serves as a symbol for the arts in Los Angeles to out-of-town and international visitors, Jones added.

“It does affect me deeply,” said Selma Holo, director of USC’s Fisher Gallery and a professor of art history at the university, “because I need to think about how I will train future museum professionals, professionals who will become directors, so that they can function with values and ideals in a real and increasingly tough world.”

Most agreed the effect would still be hard to predict. “I don’t know that it concerns me much personally,” said Stephen Cohen, who owns a Beverly Boulevard gallery and has sold work to the museum. “But the Getty is a monumental place, and what they decide to do will reverberate through the art world.”