Art, elitism, and the Getty Center

...The result has been immensely long lines of people waiting for the tram...

...He shows elemental images like people sleeping or floating in water, which he complicates with extreme slow motion, multiple and layered screens, and reflections in mirrors, all accompanied by discordant sound...

...The Getty could have spent its money improving its painting collection, and then putting it in a more ordinary site...

...Part of the delight of this piece was figuring out what was going on...

...A giant screen stood in the middle of a huge dark room (the market's cavernous basement...

...County Board of Supervisors, not exactly the most enlightened art patrons, and as a public institution LACMA has a clear obligation to serve the taxpayers of the county...

...we'll give you Sleeping Beauty's Castle...

...The Viola show was the largest installation of video work in any museum in the world...

...The problem stems from the original decision to build on a site that is virtually inaccessible...

...In the first gallery, a huge panel rotated on a pole in the middle of a dark room...

...College-age students had brought their friends, parents had brought little kids, couples seemed to be on dates...

...The piece in the market was the most famous one...

...Startled viewers watched their own reflections appear and disappear among shifting video images of youth and age and destruction...

...Most of the museum's paintings are not the kind people are eager to look at—the Getty doesn't have much Impressionist art...

...Its exhibit of video art by Bill Viola last spring presented work that doesn't pander to anyone...

...In addition to architects' sketches of different versions of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, visitors were offered a variety of stuff, including a mechanical bird labeled "Audio-Animatronics® Tiki Bird/ Adventureland, Disneyland, Anaheim, California/ Brass with compressed-air mechanism, fabric and feathers, 1963/ Walt Disney Imagineering Collection...

...It offered a twenty-five-year retrospective of the first video artist chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale (1995), a winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant...

...There was no independent thinking here, no critical distance...

...the book had self-serving prompts like "What did you learn about American popular culture from this exhibit...

...this was the real thing...

...Telling Michael Eisner what he wants to hear is undoubtedly a good fund-raising strategy, but as the basis for an art exhibit it leaves something to be desired...

...THE OTHER L.A...

...The show reached the CooperHewitt in New York last October...

...The Disney exhibit comment books in Minneapolis were different...

...They include several world-class departments: decorative arts, miniatures, nineteenth-century photographs...

...in a bold move, parts of the show were installed by Viola in big public places: the main library downtown, the Grand Central Market in the heart of the downtown Mexican shopping district...

...As a result, the Getty people felt they had to make the museum site itself a destination—someplace people would want to visit even if they didn't find the art very interesting...

...And LACMA presented Viola's work without wall text, without any explanation—which made its popularity all the more remarkable...

...It took about a minute for each drop to form and fall—a minute that was first puzzling, then exhilarating...

...One other visitor shared the gallery with me, along with three bored guards...

...Nevertheless, the institution is just as eager as governmentfunded museums to avoid charges of elitism...

...The Walker curators didn't simply provide space for comments...

...one side was a screen displaying confusing video images —a carousel, a house on fire, a huge face—projected from the opposite wall...

...Ninety percent of the comments were negative, the most frequent being "I don't care" and "boring...

...But the sense in this show is one of surrender: you didn't like Serrano's Piss Christ...

...It worked, and now the elitist institution that loudly proclaimed ordinary folks were welcome has ended up telling them to go elsewhere...

...No kidding...

...It may not be surprising that the County Museum would organize a big Bill Viola show, but it was surprising to see lots of ordinary Angelinos standing in a long line to get in...

...It ran at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in winter 1998, where director Kathy Halbreich put her own picture next to Walt's on the exhibit brochure...

...They recommended that readers "check out L.A.'s other cultural attractions...

...Both were accompanied by roaring soundtracks...

...McDonald's gives away Disney figurines with its Happy Meals, Disney stores sell Disney stuff at shopping malls across America, cable TV has an entire channel devoted to Disney...

...Yet it attracted huge crowds...

...In this, architect Richard Meier largely succeeded...

...This anxious effort had sought to persuade critics that the Getty was not, repeat not, an "elitist" institution...

...The Getty could have built somewhere in the flats of L.A., on a site served by public transportation, with adequate parking and no tram system, and ordinary folks could have come without a reservation, whenever and as often as they felt like it, the way people go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York...

...Its summer show, "Designing the Disney Theme Parks," consisted of Disney artists' drawings and sketches of the world's Disneylands...

...It's exhilarating to reach the mountaintop and gaze out from the gardens and plazas at the curving coastline on one side and the immense city stretching to the horizon on the other—if you can get a parking reservation, and if you aren't too embittered or exhausted by the wait for the tram...

...On weekends visitors have faced a one-hour wait just to get on the tram for the three-minute ride to the museum, and the museum recently announced it no longer will admit everyone who arrives at the front door...

...Instead of promising the public great art, it promises—and delivers—a thrilling site...

...With a $6 billion endowment, the Getty doesn't need to fear Jesse Helms...

...DISSENT / Winter 1999 91 The Getty has a dirty little secret: it lacks confidence that the public is interested in seeing the museum's collections...

...it might be called "elitist...

...The museum's outreach effort around the Bill Viola show extended not just to banners and billboards around town...

...Also on display was a window from the set of Disney's 1958 Zorro television show and a set of Toontown music boxes...

...Instead it adopted the opposite strategy: build on a site that would itself be stirring, beautiful, memorable...

...Jesse Helms should love this exhibit...

...Maybe that's why the Los Angeles venue has dispensed with the comment books...

...Those who don't have a parking reservation, who take the bus instead of driving, will be denied admission if the tram line is too long...

...And maybe there is hope for art in America after all...

...Eventually the drop fell and a drum made a startlingly loud amplified boom...

...The Getty outreach campaign is part of a major effort by museums throughout the country to attract a bigger and more diverse audience —the art world's strategy for combating attacks by Jesse Helms and others on public funding for the arts...

...On one side of the room a small video camera focused on a valve dripping water, while the amplified drum waited below it...

...As for the Disney show, there was one good thing about the Hammer's effort to purvey these commercial and syrupy images: it didn't seem to work...

...That's a harsh and humiliating reversal of the policy announced with great fanfare before opening day, when the museum responded to critics of its limited parking by inviting folks to take the Bundy Drive bus to the museum's tram station...

...When I visited the Hammer on a week night, the Disney show was empty...

...Viola's work qualifies as "difficult...

...This came after a feverish outreach campaign aimed at L.A.'s minority and immigrant communities, with banners throughout the city proclaiming the new building to be "YOUR Getty...

...But the audience for this work is small...

...The underlying problem is the Getty's outreach strategy...

...Henry Hopkins, director of UCLA's Hammer Museum, did not put his picture in the Hammer brochure...

...It was a young crowd...

...It's no surprise than an exhibit of official documentation of Disney theme parks would parrot the current corporate P.R...

...The LAC MA curators are part of a cohort that believe, in the words of Arthur Danto, that "the arts they administer are of vital concern to everybody, and that as many as possible should benefit from experiencing them...

...The problem with an art museum doing this kind of show is that Disney is already cel92 DISSENT / Winter 1999 ebrated everywhere...

...If more ordinary voters believe that the museums are theirs, the demagogic campaigns to defund the National Endowment for the Arts and public art will be easier to defeat...

...These different approaches reveal a great deal about the American art museum today...

...the rest of us can only worry about the pandering that makes an art museum part of the wonderful world of Disney...

...That wasn't completely convincing, because Brentwood is best known as the onetime home of the man Senator Bulworth calls "that former running back who stabbed his wife," rather than a place ordinary folks live...

...There's no way for visitors to get up the mountain to the museum except on the Getty's little three-car tram...

...Their Bill Viola retrospective, curated by Howard Fox, showed the contemporary art museum at its best...

...Comment books at museums are usually filled with bland clichés from middlebrow museumgoers, comments of the "thank you so much" school...

...Why then did the Getty board pick a site that was bound to provoke charges of elitism...

...In the next room a large video monitor showed a drop of water forming in huge closeup...

...JON WIENER, a contributing editor at the Nation, teaches American history at the University of California, Irvine...

...On the last weekend of the exhibition the line extended out the door of the gallery, through the museum courtyard, and down Wilshire Boulevard...

...The underlying problem at the Getty—"it's a full house"—is not that its outreach has been so good, but rather that its site is so bad...

...The decision made a decade ago to move the Getty's main collection from its original site near Malibu to the Brentwood mountaintop was explained by officials as a way of getting "closer to the people...

...The County Museum is a public institution: its budget comes from the L.A...

...The Disney show was curated by Karal Ann Marling, a prolific art historian at the University of Minnesota, and organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, with what the catalogue calls "the extraordinary co-operation of Walt Disney Imagineering, Walt Disney Attractions, and The Walt Disney Company...

...Moving this piece out of the museum was a genuinely anti-elitist move...

...When the panel rotated, the other side was a mirror that reflected the viewers in the room in the harsh light of the video projector...

...No problem...

...Earlier this year, when I visited the show in Minneapolis on a Sunday afternoon, the attendance was only slightly better...

...one side of the screen showed a standing man gradually deluged in water, while the other showed the same man slowly engulfed in fire...

...The curators at LACMA thus were right DISSENT / Winter 1999 • 93 to think that the lives of ordinary people could be enriched by an afternoon of looking at art that was difficult and challenging and then moving and thrilling...

...It might be possible to mount a serious exhibit about Disney theme parks, but this wasn't it...

...Thus Michael Sorkin illustrated his critique of Disneyland [Variations on a Theme Park] with his own snapshot of the sky over the park, the only view he was allowed to reproduce...

...The Getty's efforts stand in contrast to two other museums in L.A...

...Writers who fail to satisfy the Disney censors are denied permission to illustrate their work with any copyrighted material, and every inch of every Disney theme park is copyrighted...

...The Walt Disney Company is notorious for not allowing any reproduction of images of any Disney characters or sites without pre-publication screening of all accompanying text...

...An art museum ought to be a place where people can get away for an hour or two from this world of corporate and commercial images, where they can experience something unfamiliar or challenging or mysterious or maybe even beautiful, or maybe a place where they could confront something confusing or difficult...

...Instead this show celebrated Walt's genius and love of America and dedication to good clean fun, and it nervously declared that today's Disney corporate bigwigs are carrying on the vision of their founder...

...THE LOS ANGELES County Museum of Art (LACMA) provides a bracing counterexample...

...Everyone going to the rest rooms in the Grand Central Market had a chance to pause and look...

...that have undertaken notable initiatives in recent months: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has shown challenging contemporary art that drew big crowds, and the Armand Hammer Museum of UCLA, which recently ran a pathetically ingratiating show of sketches of Disneyland...

...museum built on the fortune of an oil tycoon, UCLA's Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, has adopted a different strategy of dealing with anxiety over elitism—one that can only be called pandering...

...No doubt the video medium was part of the attraction, but this was not a show of Disney cartoons...

...neither of the two currently contending schools of critical theory was represented: not the ironic porno enthusiasm for pop, nor the Adorno-esque condemnation of cultural decline...

...Visitors quietly explained to each other that this was a "live" video...

...Featuring a dozen happy kids from different races, the ads were headlined "It's a full house...