ART

MICHAEL BRAND

Director, J. Paul Getty Museum

What must it be like to assume one of the most coveted museum directorships in the nation at a time when the institution is artistically adrift and under gathering legal clouds? Michael Brand finds out in January, when he becomes the third director of the J. Paul Getty Museum since it opened in 1997 as the centerpiece of Brentwood’s hugely rich Getty Center.

The Australian-born scholar of Indian and Southeast Asian art, which the Getty does not collect, catapulted into the limelight from the directorship of the second-tier Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The lengthy search was conducted as California’s attorney general opened an investigation into the financial practices of Barry Munitz, Getty Trust president (and Brand’s new boss), and foreign governments demanded the return of Getty antiquities they say were looted. Ironically, the institution’s troubles -- which long predate the new director -- should provide Brand with a freer hand than he might otherwise have had.

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MATT JOHNSON

Sculptor

In 2004, Matt Johnson made a drawing that showed how to unfold a heavy-duty steel Waste Management garbage dumpster, flatten it out, then refold it into the whimsical form of a paper airplane. The recycling fantasy would fly only in your mind -- which for art is finally the best place. If this charged work’s altered normalcy loosely recalls the sculptural approach of Charles Ray, perhaps that’s because the New York-born Johnson graduated from UCLA, where Ray is on the faculty. Last year the 27-year-old made a splash in “Thing,” the UCLA Hammer Museum’s first-rate survey of new L.A. sculpture.

His unforgettable work became the poster-image hanging from lampposts all over town: “Breadface,” a painted-plastic doppelganger for a slice of Wonder bread idly torn into a blank mask, looked like a relic salvaged from a lost civilization. This year Johnson will have his first sizable solo exhibition, at Culver City’s Blum & Poe Gallery (dates TBA).

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ELIZABETH ARMSTRONG

Deputy director and chief curator,

Orange County Museum of Art

When the Orange County Museum of Art chose to reopen its renovated building with a large and reinvigorated California Biennial in 2004, the decision sent a pointed signal. OCMA had been struggling through a rough period, financially and in terms of its erratic program, but the museum threw down a gauntlet: Front and center went a statewide survey of new art (by 27 mostly younger artists) that emphasized developments in Los Angeles.

OCMA, isolated in a suburban sea of cultural mediocrity, recognized that its circumstance made it an ideal venue for the type of survey that, if held in L.A., would chiefly be carrying coals to Newcastle. In Newport Beach it played against type, creating necessary friction and considerable heat. Deputy director and chief curator Elizabeth Armstrong and her team unveil the refreshed biennial’s next installment in September.