Restoring laurels lost

ALMOST nine years and $275 million later, a beautifully refurbished and expanded Getty Villa at the edge of Malibu has reopened to curious visitors. As the nation’s only museum devoted solely to the art of Classical antiquity, the Villa is a magnificent gift to the public.

Don’t expect it to have much discernible impact on the art life of Los Angeles, though. The museum will surely make a difference to scholars and students. And like its companion Getty Center in Brentwood, the seaside Villa will be extremely popular with tourists. But for Angelenos it will mostly be a place to bring out-of-town guests or schedule an occasional outing.

In the sprawling megalopolis, geography alone puts both branches of the Getty at a physical remove from daily civic life. Given a Brentwood hilltop reached by tram or a Malibu-adjacent canyon accessible when PCH or Sunset Boulevard isn’t backed up with traffic, neither is a place where anyone but a neighborhood resident is likely to drop in without considerable planning. For L.A., the Getty Center and the Getty Villa are the art museum equivalent of Lawry’s the Prime Rib -- a place for special occasions. That’s just an insurmountable fact of life.

Still, geography isn’t the only reason the Getty doesn’t matter to Los Angeles nearly as much as it should. The bigger culprit is found within the institution itself, especially at the administrative level. There a tiresome combination of indifference and inexperience prevails.

Since it received its enormous inheritance from oil magnate J. Paul Getty in 1982, two presidents have headed the Getty Trust, which governs the many-sided organization. (The endowment now stands at more than $5 billion.) Each leader could accurately claim manifold skills, but neither had a lick of professional art experience. Both were money managers first.

Vision is hard to come by, but it’s harder still when priorities are reversed. One reason the Los Angeles Philharmonic is such a resounding success is that its skilled executive director is a classically trained musician with administrative savvy. The Getty’s upside-down choices show instead that its chief goal has always been to care for the enormous endowment -- to protect the money. Only secondarily comes the more cogent and difficult endeavor, which is to spend the money well.

The Trust is the largest art philanthropy in the United States, but for all its influence on the art life of L.A. it might as well be in Dubuque. How could that be changed?

Given the Getty’s resources, imagination is just about the only limit on possibilities. Here are five ideas:

Build a Getty Museum

of photographs

A new, free-standing, urban museum could help alleviate the remote, touristoriented feeling of the Getty. Weaving its most accessible art form more closely into the fabric of the city’s art life would also help.

To build critical mass, two locations for a Getty Museum of Photographs are obvious: Wilshire Boulevard, within walking distance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or Grand Avenue, near the Museum of Contemporary Art and Disney Hall.

I’ve noted before that the history of L.A. pretty much coincides with the history of the camera. Both emerged in the mid-19th century, exploded as a social force by the 1920s and began to achieve critical mass in American life after 1960. This city was built on camera images, which is reason enough to undertake the project.

But if you need another, consider that the Getty holds the nation’s greatest collection of photographs. It’s especially strong in the early French and British origins of the art, the most difficult works to collect today. The central resource for a stand-alone museum -- a large and magnificent collection -- is already in place.

You might not know that if you visited the Getty Center. Like an iceberg, just the tip of the vast, mostly submerged collection rises into view. At any given time, 100 to 200 photographs are on display in four-month exhibitions -- from a collection that numbers well over 65,000 individual works. At that rate, it would take more than a century to show the whole thing.

Nor is a chronological survey on view, even though the history of photography could easily be told in a host of ways just with that collection. Adding a dedicated museum to existing photo galleries at the Getty Center would provide it with the public prominence the collection now lacks but deserves.

A Getty Museum of Photographs could also draw on the prodigious resources of the Getty Research Institute, with its own enormous holdings of vernacular photos. By itself the newly acquired Julius Shulman Archive numbers more than a quarter-million prints, negatives and transparencies.

The Research Institute recently announced a long-awaited project to conserve and digitize 3,000-plus videotapes produced since the 1970s by an array of significant artists working at the Long Beach Museum of Art, giving the Getty a start on an even more up-to-the-minute form of camera art. Photograph and video conservation facilities incorporated into a new museum could also be the basis for a master’s training program in conjunction with UCLA, much like the one in antiquities conservation just launched at the new Getty Villa.

Grow the Getty’s

art collections

SPEAKING of photographs, the Getty’s department has been successful in building a support group and attracting gifts of art. Despite that, and despite the collection’s unrivaled importance, the department has seen its annual acquisition budget decline since the Getty Center opened in 1997 -- by an average of 17%. Art prices have risen during that time, making the acquisition cuts even worse.

The photographs department might count its blessings, though, because it is doing twice as well as the art museum’s other five departments. When adjusted for inflation, the average annual museum expenditure on art has dropped 34% since the Getty Center opened eight years ago.

That’s about $30 million a year. A good chunk of that money has been shifted to grants -- more about that bad idea in a moment -- draining away from what should be the Getty’s highest priority. Those funds should be restored.

Most of it should be used to develop holdings in areas in which the Getty does not now collect -- specifically Latin American, Asian and Modern and contemporary art.

Here’s how to do it: The Getty should provide most of the restored millions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, whose own curators of Latin American, Asian, Modern and contemporary art can knowledgeably acquire work in their respective fields. Their newly hefty acquisition budgets would far surpass most other American museums, while LACMA and MOCA have the exhibition space and support staff to maintain the new collections, which the Getty would own. A Getty Collection of Latin American Art at LACMA, a Getty Collection of Contemporary Art at MOCA and similar holdings would, within five years, utterly transform both of those institutions.

Photography was a new collecting territory for the Getty in 1984, when the museum suddenly set the art world on its ear by spending almost $23 million to acquire nine outstanding private collections. Overnight, the center of gravity for American scholarship in photography shifted from East to West. Today, as the city’s Latino and Asian populations continue to swell, the Getty’s collections would begin to look like L.A.

Fund a culture magazine

THE Getty should invest in an international art magazine, paying writers the same commercial rates as the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and it should develop the monthly journal in hard copy and on the Internet.

Periodically, someone writes an essay about a crisis in art criticism. (Check the January issue of Art in America for the latest.) But the claim is mostly bogus. The real crisis exists in art publishing, not writing, where any number of smart, stylish practitioners can be identified. Publishing, meanwhile, is a mess.

Art magazines come in one of three kinds. There are trade journals, such as Art in America and Artforum, where the reliance on commercial gallery advertising infects the critical content to a degree where almost nothing but gushing encomiums and society gossip get published; the ads become the most interesting part.

Then there are traditional “little magazines,” such as October and the New Criterion, where adherence to leftist and right-wing political ideology (and its funding sources in academia and corporate think tanks) is strict -- meaning that a glance down the table of contents usually supplants any need to read the essays inside. And finally there are the small, regional journals, which few outside the regions bother with because art is cosmopolitan. The Getty could make a real difference.

Crucially, however, its involvement in such a publication should be kept at more than arm’s length. Independence is essential to critical integrity, and the Getty is too powerful.

One possible model for an initiative is Harper’s, perhaps America’s best monthly general-interest magazine. The MacArthur Foundation and Atlantic Richfield Co. rescued the venerable-but-tired Harper’s from the brink of collapse in 1980. They conceived and funded the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, which now operates the publication independently; in the last decade it has won nine National Magazine Awards. An independent cultural journal produced from Los Angeles and written for a literate, curious general readership, rather than just academics or the art world, could have a dramatic national impact.

Invent a new

collecting field

BUILDING on the second idea, the Getty should establish a new and ingenious museum department: domestic architecture. Los Angeles is among the world’s most innovative cities for design, and much of that architectural innovation has taken place in housing. The Getty could collect domestic architecture.

More often than not, masterpieces of domestic L.A. architecture go to wrack and ruin or hang on by a fingernail beneath the threat of the wrecking ball. No need to list the horror stories yet again. The Getty could acquire significant houses; restore them; install architecture students from USC, UCLA and SCI-ARC in residence; and, finally, devise a way to regularly open them to the public.

The Shulman Archive at the Research Institute would come in handy too, since photographing houses was Shulman’s specialty. Every significant domicile ever built in the city is probably represented.

Create a continuing

global exhibition

DOCUMENTA, the quadrennial survey of international contemporary art in Kassel, Germany, was born in 1955 as a way to atone for the anti-Modern sins of the country’s Nazi past while simultaneously engaging the Cold War by defying the Soviet repression of art underway a few miles down the road in East Germany. Now the world’s most important periodic survey, Documenta succeeded beyond its founders’ wildest dreams.

Today’s post-Cold War geopolitical mix is entirely different. Given the steady rise of China as a superpower and the growing prominence of India, Los Angeles stands as the cultural doorway between West and East. A periodic survey in L.A. of global art could oil the hinges.

The necessary exhibition space already exists -- at the Getty, LACMA, MOCA and other museum and university galleries around the city. Nontraditional sites could also be used. Sprawl is among the virtues of Documenta, where art seems to invade every corner of otherwise sleepy Kassel and art aficionados come from around the world; and L.A. knows from sprawl.

The cost would be minimal. The budget for the most recent Documenta was $11.5 million. During the same four-year period, the Getty’s operating expense was about a billion dollars.

Weighing the prospects

ARE there other ideas? Sure. But let’s stop here for a moment and ask, “What are the odds that these (or any others) might actually happen?”

The grim answer is: Somewhere between slim and none.

Why? Well, there’s that established Getty administrative combo of indifference and inexperience. And the Trust’s priorities have also been changing. The 34% plunge in art acquisition funds is proof enough of that. Just 10 days ago the Getty fiddled while a 15th century relief sculpture by Italian Renaissance master Donatello went to its Texas rival, the Kimbell Art Museum.

What has replaced buying art? For one thing, giving money away.

Under Barry Munitz, the Trust’s current president, the grant program has ballooned. The Getty’s website chirps that from 1985 to 2005 almost $220 million was awarded to projects in 175 countries around the world. But what it doesn’t say is that more than half of that was given away since 2000. After the Getty Center opened and the acquisition budget plunged, the grant budget nearly tripled. The priority shift was cemented last year when the program was grandly renamed the Getty Foundation.

No doubt most funded projects, some of which are in Los Angeles, have intrinsic worth. Still, you have to wonder: Why should the Getty give, say, $750,000 to meritorious initiatives at Harvard University -- whose own $26-billion endowment dwarfs the Getty’s by a factor of five -- when an endless list of equally exemplary art needs are scattered all over L.A.? Why carry coals to Newcastle?

One answer to that question is not pretty: You can’t fly first class from LAX to Wilshire Boulevard, not to mention comp your wife on the luxury trip, or rent a $35,000 estate for a glamorous extended stay in downtown Los Angeles.

The lavish national and foreign travel perquisites afforded Munitz -- unique in the charitable world -- have been well-documented in this newspaper. Munitz explained his first-class spending to a reporter in London, where lots of Getty money goes, by saying that in L.A. “people find it embarrassing to travel commercial class.” Joke or not, his conception of “L.A. people” was limited to those with access to a corporate or private jet. By that yardstick, first-class travel appears downright frugal.

Personal grandiosity is one crippling issue. Institutional grandiosity is another. Overreach has been a chronic Getty problem. When the organization is routinely described as the world’s richest art philanthropy, all the world’s art problems seem to be within its purview.

Consider Munitz’s predecessor, Harold Williams. His vision was behind the trust’s creation of seven distinct programs, and it guided the construction of the Brentwood campus -- at a cost of well over $1 billion -- designed specifically to accommodate their needs. By the time the place was finished, two of those programs had already come a cropper. Munitz was then charged with dismantling them and reconfiguring others. Programmatically, the new Getty Center acropolis was obsolete the day it opened.

Williams also stumbled badly with a million-dollar initiative to assemble a contemporary drawing collection to adorn Trust offices, as a local demonstration of Getty support for new art. To carry out the plan he promptly hired a respected corporate art consultant in New York, plainly oblivious to two facts. First, the Getty is not a blue-chip corporation. And second, down below the Brentwood aerie, L.A. had long since blossomed into one of the world’s most exciting production centers for new art. The dollar figure was modest, but the project revealed a troubling assumption -- namely, that momentous art was only found elsewhere, and that the Getty saw its charge as importing it to town.

At least Williams’ management dreams were focused first on art and secondarily on L.A. Those days, flawed or not, are over.

With Munitz shelling out $500,000 to a public relations firm to promote a White House initiative for the exploration of Mars, providing Research Institute office space to former California Gov. Pete Wilson, shoveling more than $1 million into a documentary movie about struggling public school teachers and other distractions, the focus is long gone.

Tragically, there’s no one left in the Getty hierarchy to notice the blur. The board of trustees, which Munitz has had a hand in overhauling, is now composed almost entirely of wealthy individuals with prestigious positions in the business world. There is a private art collector or two; but there’s not a scholar, artist, intellectual, major cultural figure or eminent retired art professional with a seat at the Getty boardroom table. The governing authority of the nation’s largest art philanthropy includes virtually no one with personal knowledge of the institution’s core work.

That fact is worth repeating, because it strains believability: The governing authority of the nation’s largest art philanthropy includes virtually no one with personal knowledge of the institution’s core work.

Yes, they can all read the billion-dollar balance sheets and protect the money. But without advocates in either the boardroom or the president’s office with the capacity to know whether that money is being well spent, ideas like the five here are mere pipe dreams. And so are the ones you might come up with yourself.