New Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Learn to Love It, It’s Happening

The biggest cultural news in Los Angeles, aside from high culture’s deep freeze during the COVID crisis, is the demolition of the old Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings and the construction of a new museum now estimated to cost $650 million. I wrote about this project in 2019, endorsing it with a raft of reservations and doing so in variance with the Los Angeles art establishment, which liked the project until it decided to hate it.

Now that four old museum buildings have been demolished and the new LACMA is a construction site, there’s no going back. With a queasy stomach, I still think it’s the right thing to do. The new LACMA is a single-story, serpentine building stretching from the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits, a 40,000-year-old oozing oil swamp packed with fossils, to the other side of Wilshire Boulevard.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

The biggest cultural news in Los Angeles, aside from high culture’s deep freeze during the COVID crisis, is the demolition of the old Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings and the construction of a new museum now estimated to cost $650 million. I wrote about this project in 2019, endorsing it with a raft of reservations and doing so in variance with the Los Angeles art establishment, which liked the project until it decided to hate it.

Now that four old museum buildings have been demolished and the new LACMA is a construction site, there’s no going back. With a queasy stomach, I still think it’s the right thing to do. The new LACMA is a single-story, serpentine building stretching from the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits, a 40,000-year-old oozing oil swamp packed with fossils, to the other side of Wilshire Boulevard.