The Hollow Egalitarianism of LA's Revamped Art Museum
At the redesigned Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the art-world tradition of mistaking spiritual anti-hierarchy for class politics is alive and well. LACMA treats labor as a source of authenticity but ignores its own workers’ demands for a living wage.
The revamped Los Angeles County Museum of Art imagines itself to be demolishing social hierarchies. But its romantic fantasy of labor has little to do with actual workers — like its own employees, who are fighting for adequate compensation. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
Peter Zumthor, the architect of the controversial new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), wants to make one thing very clear: that “this building never looks down on you.” His sentiments are vaguely populist: the building “should be open to the people.” It’s a building type, he says, that “treats everybody equal” and “lets you have your opinion. Follow your own path.” Michael Govan, the equally controversial museum director who has steered this project since its inception in 2006, mirrors the architect’s vision: “You make your own path, you decide” where to go. The gallery guide is called “Wander.”
The former building, designed in 1965 by William Pereira, arranged works along chronological, geographic, and cultural lines, creating a multifloor, “hierarchical” structure. The new museum is organized across a single level elevated thirty feet in the air around four major bodies of water: the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. The 347,500-square-foot structure made of raw, unpigmented, board-formed concrete contains 110,000 square feet of display space and exhibits about 2,500 pieces of ancient and modern art, mixing new and old, high and low, East and West, and everything in between. At a cost of $720 million (and rising), the design was funded with a mix of sources from Los Angeles County and a few ultrawealthy megadonors.
If there is one point that is stressed in every press release and architectural statement, it’s the idea that the “building de-emphasizes structural hierarchies.” One story tall, it has no high or low, no front or back. Govan speaks of a “mingling of objects and influences ever on the move,” a space “where you have inherently baked in it these areas of crossings, connections, diasporas.” He describes his vision as creating “an equitable organization of cultures, equally accessible” to all. A New Yorker puff piece makes the design’s basic aim explicit: “The idea was to abolish the hierarchies inherent in the old museums, which offered prime real estate to European painting and shunted other cultures and their artifacts aside.”
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.