CULTURE MONSTER

If you collect contemporary paintings, the J. Paul Getty Museum just might want to show them.

At least, that’s the odd conclusion drawn from the Getty’s puzzling announcement this week that it has borrowed for three months Lucian Freud’s small 1949-50 “Still Life With Aloe” from local collector Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, for the third installment of the museum’s “Interjections” series. The Freud went on view in the South Pavilion on Tuesday, juxtaposed with a Jean-Simeon Chardin still life from about 1759 and one by Giovanna Garzoni from the late 1640s. The only thing I can’t figure out is, why?

“Interjections” was launched as a series of loan exchanges between the Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The second installment went up in late 2005, when MOCA’s 1939 Mondrian abstraction was installed at the Getty next to its 1450-55 “Annunciation” by Dieric Bouts. In exchange, the Getty lent its Caspar David Friedrich to MOCA, where it was installed with a MOCA painting by Scottish artist Christopher Orr.

When sharply selected, pictures from different cultures and different eras are always interesting to compare. And museums perform a real service when they cooperate with such exchanges from their permanent collections. But a painting by a living artist (Freud is 86) owned by a private collector is a different, frankly more speculative matter. It’s not as if we were getting any insight into the holdings of local institutions, which is a good reason for “Interjections” to take place.

Beyond random voyeuristic appeal, why, exactly, is the public supposed to care about what’s hanging in someone’s Westside living room? L.A. has lots of art collectors, so by what criteria does the museum choose? And I wonder what the Getty’s Chardin and Garzoni would look like flanking, say, Meyer Vaisman’s 1987 “Still Life” or Robert Rauschenberg’s 1958 “Coca Cola Plan,” both owned by MOCA.

It’s doubtful the Getty will be sending any paintings over to the Lynton family’s house or Sony’s Culver City offices, because the reciprocity built into the earlier “Interjections” does not now apply. But maybe they could do it virtually: The Sony Pictures Entertainment Museum does exist online as a cool website.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com