Some compared it to the Grammys and others to the Oscars, but when Barbara Kruger called it "anthropology," she nailed it. The black-tie gala introducing the Renzo Piano–designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum to Los Angeles society last Saturday night, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was interspecies communication at its best, very like The Day of the Locust. Except that this event was strictly postfiction, with competing narratives involving movie stars, pop stars, studio heads, philanthropists, politicians, museum directors—and a smattering of people who make art, most of them male.
However, the gala’s purpose was not to make (or look at) art or artists. It was to make (and look at) money: over $5 million, the amount it raised for the museum, minus the $1.5 million it cost. Organized with military precision by LACMA’s crack development and marketing team the guests had shelled out big bucks (tables cost $25,000 to $100,000) to witness the unveiling of the $56 million BCAM. And they did. But they also had to endure the canonization of Eli Broad.
The party began on a red carpet rolled onto the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, where celebrities could stop for photo ops with paparazzi, before a line of taiko drummers and valet-parking attendants dressed in black BCAM BORN 02-09-08 T-shirts bearing the image of Jeff Koons’s cracked red egg that LACMA adopted for its BCAM opening. Performers on stilts, costumed as dragons, nudged guests through Chris Burden’s outdoor allées of vintage LA lampposts (a permanent installation called Urban Light) and into the pavilion, where tray-carrying “waiters” carved from blocks of ice proffered flutes of champagne.
Throughout the cocktail hour, the building that everyone had come to see remained hidden from view by fabric curtain walls. That mystified many patrons, who wondered what they were supposed to talk about during dinner, if not the art. Still, it was hard not to appreciate the ironies of an event that included, along with the ritual speeches of congratulation for anyone not an artist, a bar mitzvah–like set by Lionel Richie. I don't think I’ll ever forget watching the seventy-four-year-old Broad dance to “Brick House,” cheek by jowl with several hundred other people on a narrow strip of lighted Plexiglas floor. What really set tongues clucking, though, was the overproduced commercial for Broad, starring Boone, Baldessari, Koons, Damien Hirst, and even Richard Serra, all testifying to Broad’s generous patronage and “talents” as a collector.
No sooner did the film end than those attempting to flee were stopped in their tracks by the pounding chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” played loud from a stage descending from fifty feet above and carrying the pouty young pianist William Joseph. Just then, the tent wall behind the players fell to the ground and there, klieg-lit and framed by Robert Irwin’s palm-tree garden, was the three-story BCAM in all its travertine glory. A dozen violinists with faces painted bright red to match Piano’s exterior escalator were also playing “Kashmir” as the crowd at last ascended to the building’s glass-ceilinged top floor. Here, amid a veritable playland of Koonsiana, bookended by Andy Warhol and Baldessari paintings (as if Koons were the key to these artists), the crowd gathered to grouse and coo at what was clearly the most expensive, rather than the most representative, display of works in Eli and Edythe Broad’s collection.while wondering whether the show wasn't more exposition than exhibition. It certainly did bare the machinations of power in art. As Kruger’s pungent text work, commissioned by LACMA for BCAM’s glass elevator shaft, put it, PLENTY SHOULD BE ENOUGH. If only we could all be as perfect.
