On visiting Broad Contemporary Art Museum

Made my first visit to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week and walked away with two questions. The first is the usual: what makes this stuff “art”? This was prompted first by seeing galleries devoted to Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly back-to-back. I like Twombly’s work, but I don’t know how I would answer my question should someone on a tour pose it. The wall label spoke of balance, but it’s hard for me to see how moving one or some of the squiggles to a different spot would much change the effect. As for Kelly, whom I admit I don’t like, the label said how hard it was to do what he did, and how remarkable that he is able to use the wall (which is beyond his control, in any case) to complete his shapes. I can’t imagine that there aren’t hundreds or thousands of others who could do just what he does – he happens to have gotten there first. Which leads to the second question, which I will defer for one minute.
The adjoining two galleries are currently devoted to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who provide subject matter that can be talked about, and more in the way of painterly technique, although some of their pieces are a challenge to defend. They are a breeze, however, compared to the works in the other half of the Broad’s third floor, by Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and most notoriously, Jeff Koons. I don’t hate all of Koons’s work, but everything here is pretty atrocious, from Michael Jackson and the monkey to two inflated water floats for tots suspended on a chain-link fence. Vacuum cleaners are piled in cases, and an ugly blue balloon dog dominates the room.
As for the second question: how much of looking at art, whether in a museum or a rich person’s house, is identifying what you see, versus appreciating it as art? How often in a modern art gallery do we look around and say to ourselves (or a companion we are impressing), there’s a Kelly, there’s a Johns, there’s a Warhol? By having entire galleries of an artist, the Broad made it clear that mere identification was not enough. Obviously, these were all Kellys. So then I had to ask myself, what am I getting out of this gallery? The answer, more often than not, was, not much. I failed to mention the other “modern master” who was given a gallery to himself: Roy Lichtenstein. With his dots, he is easy to identify, but how much more is there to see? Who wants to look at his “pop” version of Picasso’s cubism. A cute trick, but why is it art? If I were to hang a Lichtenstein in my living room, it would be to let people know I owned a Lichtenstein, so they could identify it the moment they entered my house. It wouldn’t be because I wanted to gaze at it, or study it, or contemplate what it said to me.

On the second floor, a special exhibition of the “Two Germanys” from 1940 to 1990 raised another question: how valid is it to identify specific art as the art of a (modern Western European) nation? There will always be thousands of artists making art that often has nothing to with any other art being produced in the same place. The notion of national art is probably a vestige of the days when a court or a church could dictate what art got produced, or at least saved. Because art history has taught us to lump together Italian Baroque or Dutch 17th-century art or American 19th-century landscapes, we look to do the same in modern times. But lumping now is really just the vision of a particular curator, who has infinite examples to choose from. We see this every two years when the Whitney Biennial attempts a snapshot of the zeitgeist.
The ground floor of the Broad features two massive installations by Richard Serra, and I suppose these are more permanent than the displays in the upper two stories. Walking through “Band” was a fun experience: I found myself tilting as the walls on either side tilted beside me. But I have had similar sensations in amusement park fun houses, and no one would consider them art.

A wonderful antidote to my experience at Broad came later the same day, when we stopped at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. They were featuring a Vermeer on loan from the National Gallery, “Woman at her Writing Desk.” What a thrill to stand inches in front of the painting, despite its glazing, with no one else around, and feel yourself drawn into the scene. The light focused on the woman’s left shoulder, her yellow jacket, and made you wonder why Vermeer chose this spot to focus his camera lucida, if that’s what he used. Every part of the composition invited contemplation, and that was before you began to wonder what the woman was thinking, and why had she looked up just then? There were many other treats, notably several Boudin beach scenes, with their mass of people, so beautifully dressed, crowded impossibly together, yet each so distinct. You have to wonder if 100 years from now, or 300 years from now, the Ellsworth Kelly will still speak to anyone the way the Vermeer and Boudin do to me today. I ask the question, but you already know my answer.