Is the Getty Really Spending That Much Money for Its Redo?

Visitor fluff, climate kookery, and a new tram motor, all set to cost as much as $800 million, plus news from the ballroom front and LOVE in court

I atone for mistakes, correct them as soon as I discover them, and thank God I don’t make them as often as, say, the New York Times, which does indeed have an errata section. I used to read it but don’t bother anymore. There, a true and honest correction page would involve reprinting the entire paper and adding “no,” “not,” “nunca,” “oops,” “never mind,” and “what a lyin’ dogface pony soldier thing to say” to nearly every sentence. I’ll start my monthly news story not so much with a correction but an admission and elaboration.

I have to be less diplomatic, less like a dove and more like one of those saber-toothed cats whose models I saw at the La Brea Tar Pits when I was in Los Angeles last week. Many of my reader friends think I’m high as a kite on the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “Oh, you really do love it,” I’ve heard over and over. No, I don’t. It’s fine, and I like it and see room for experimentation in our country’s multifaceted museum world, but when it comes to the new LACMA, one is enough. I wrote that many of the galleries look like boutiques. If I were still a curator, I’d die if someone said a gallery I arranged looked like a high-end shop. “Good luck finding an old favorite,” I warned, in case you were looking for one. “It could be anywhere, or . . . in storage,” because the galleries are organized by theme rather than period or nation or style. After spending $725 million, LACMA’s got less, not more, gallery space.

The new LACMA is suited for Los Angeles, where most people don’t care about art history. They like themes from everyday life grasped without hard thinking, and they love an eclectic but very arranged look. Diversity looms so large. None is a particular virtue. This said, after 40 years of talk, talk, talk about a landmark expansion, it was time to do it. If not now, never. And to its great credit, LACMA did what it said it would do. I wondered in my story when, not if, a financial hangover will smack LACMA in the face, especially when fussy systems break. I could’ve added that concrete buildings in cities are very tricky. Unless they’re kept pristine, they look very East Berlin very fast.

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The Getty’s Brentwood location — the branch of the Los Angeles museum accessed by the tram — is closing on March 15 for about a year “to elevate the overall visitor experience, enhance accessibility, and strengthen energy resilience.” After closing for a year and a half during the Covid mass hysteria and vacation from reality, I didn’t think it would close again in my lifetime. What does this mean, aside from another year with a big shut sign that you can see from I-405? For starters, it means spending as much as $800 million. My jaw dropped. That’s between $600 and $800 million, according to the Getty but, to paraphrase that beacon for the life of humble living, Michelle Obama, when they go low, I think high.

“New ways to connect with art” like “revitalized galleries” and more indoor/outdoor displays will happen. HVAC improvements are already underway. The Getty will get a new welcome center, café, and shop, all frivolous expenditures since what they have now is fine. “A redesigned arrival and departure experience” at the Getty’s iconic tram, “new wayfinding support,” and improved visitor orientation all sound like the Getty and a corps of high-paid consultants just returned from a navel-gazing retreat. If the money’s going to renovate the tram itself, I’d say yes, to the greater glory of infrastructure. I hear it’s getting a new propulsion system.

People ought to visit the Getty for the art, though, not an Orient Express experience in transit from the garage to the galleries. And if wayfinding and orientation are problems, and the Getty attracts lots of foreigners and American tourists, then these can be inexpensively addressed. President Trump’s pool guys just repaired and refreshed the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pond at 1/15th of the cost that the Interior Department planned to pay, $2 million rather than $30 million. Hire Trump’s hotel-signage guys to help with the wayfinding. No one gets lost in a Trump hotel.

A chunk of the Getty’s money will probably go to its climate-change protocols, especially to reaching “net zero.” This is a waste of philanthropic dollars. The world’s climate is always changing, over hundreds of millions of years. Climate change, or what used to be called global warming, is part delusion, part naïveté, part ignorance, and part vainglory. A nanosecond of Chinese pollution negates everything that effete, elite museums do in a year if not a decade. The Getty should work to enhance its HVAC system to preserve the art it owns — a narrow charge — rather than embrace its own “Green New Deal.” That’s a vanity project. The Getty’s a charity, a very rich one, but it still needs to live modestly.

Sometimes a museum has to close. An addition or a renovation can turn the entire museum into a construction site or a place that feels uncomfortably like one. Sometimes museum-wide systems need to be dismantled. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Met recently did big construction projects. Their campuses are so expansive that visitors weren’t aware that intense hardhat activity was in the works.

The Getty is vaster. With a gimlet eye toward economy and accessibility — a museum’s not accessible if it’s shut — it can stay open and do what it really needs.

And $800 million is a boatload of money for what the Getty says it’s doing. That’s more than LACMA spent for a new museum the size of three football fields. Are Somalis doing the work? I’m happy to see that the Getty Villa and its antiquities collection will remain open and that a temporary art space on Sepulveda Boulevard will display collection highlights. Will the staff work from home? That’s a euphemism for dabbling in work in between a snorkel here and there, searching for shark teeth, and building sand mazes, as we learned from the museum world’s Covid experience.

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Speaking of construction sites, a federal district court judge in Washington has enjoined the marble sawyers, glazers, and gilders from working on the new White House ballroom, for now. Lots of geezers and fantasists and dumb Ivy Leaguers cry about “No Kings” in the White House, but what about the dozens of kings on the federal bench who’ve gone wild-and-whimsical? Is Judge Richard Leon one of them? He’s ruled that the 90,000 square feet of new space for waltzing and blathering and preening in fancy dress need to get congressional approval to proceed. While the president is the White House’s steward, Leon writes, “he’s not the owner!” This judge is an excitable one and known for using exclamation points.

Leon ruled in a suit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which claims that the ballroom’s massing and height would overwhelm its classical proportions. Both the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capitol Planning Commission have approved the ballroom’s design. How many people need to approve this thing, which I agree is too big? Leon is a player, and he’s thwarting the ballroom and Trump, and I’ll toss in double exclamation points even though I’m not surprised!!

On the one hand, a statute on the books since 1912 prohibits the erection of any building or structure on the public grounds of the federal government in the District of Columbia without the approval of Congress. On the other hand, another statute, from 1948, authorizes the president to spend as he wishes money appropriated by Congress for “the care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurbishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting” of the White House. An addition is an alteration. That it’s donor-sponsored doesn’t seem to change who’s in charge of what.

The National Trust argued that the National Park Service and a host of others in the executive branch have stepped beyond the scope of their powers, and that this warrants “the immediate intervention of an equity court,” the touchy-feely, anything-goes pit stop in the judicial system. ¡It’s what the Supreme Court called a “Hail Mary pass,” or pase de Ave María, when the facts have taken us to the very edge of the point of no return — once the thing’s built, it’s moot — and I get an exclamation point at the beginning and the end since I’ve used a Spanish term!

I don’t think Congress has ever jumped in the middle of a White House redo, large or small, where there’s no appropriation involved. Maybe it should have that statutory power, but it doesn’t now, there’s a big-ass hole in the ground, and $400 million has been pledged. Trump is going to get his ballroom one way or the other. Judge Leon should direct the ants in his pants toward subjects actually covered by federal law. And that’s a Max Five!!!!!

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On another subject in the Swamp, last week the National Gallery of Art (NGA) got its biggest cash gift since those from its founders. It’s a $116 million fund to endow the museum’s Across the Nation program, a pilot premiering last year in which the NGA makes handfuls of short-term loans from its permanent collection to select museums in what my late grandmother called “the provinces.” Mitchell Rales, the investor, philanthropist, and former NGA board president, made the gift.

Ten museums got loans last year. Some did focus shows. Some paired the loans, usually four or five paintings, with things in their permanent-collection galleries. It’s a good idea and a splendid and generous gift for America’s 250th. The NGA covers crating, shipping, insurance, and national marketing, leaving the museums to pay the cost of putting the art on the walls.

How did last year’s pilot program go? I saw too many duds from the NGA, which isn’t, by and large, lending its best, and dud ideas from the borrowers. Now that the program’s endowed, I hope the bar’s raised.

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Love is in the air, or, more precisely, LOVE, Robert Indiana’s iconic sculpture that started as a drawing he gave to Ellsworth Kelly, his lover. From there, it evolved into handmade greeting cards he sent to friends, a painting in 1966, a frequently produced sculpture in the early 1970s, and then a first-class stamp. Indiana (1928–2018) died amid charges that he’d been a victim of elder abuse and that his caregiver and art publisher had engaged in forgery and copyright infringement. Last week, a New York jury awarded $102 million to the Morgan Art Foundation, the for-profit business that claimed the exclusive right to product development based on Indiana’s work. The lawsuit claimed that Michael McKenzie — who’d worked with Indiana, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and many others in publishing — had produced and sold unauthorized versions of Indiana’s work, falsely representing them as authorized.

The issue was who owned the copyright to LOVE’s design. McKenzie produced an image of a statue called HOPE, hoping to draw from the Obama magic, and BRAT, a sculpture commissioned by a Wisconsin sausage maker. Since Indiana’s design is so well known and the roster of four-letter words is a commercially massive one, big bucks were involved. There’s also the question of instability in the art market, since no one could be sure which of Indiana’s works were forgeries.

Indiana isn’t the most overrated artist in the world. In that race would be Basquiat, Warhol, Shepard Fairey, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, Yoko Ono, Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Jenny Holzer, Mel Bochner, and, of course, Jackson Pollock. Indiana’s work is charming, and he’s among the few upbeat artists to come from the late 1960s and early ’70s.

That said, I don’t like word artists. They seem lazy. And $102 million is a boatload of money. What is it with New York juries? They live in a bubble and tend to catastrophize. They’re walking, talking, hot-and-bothered exclamation points. Get real. McKenzie is appealing the verdict. I think a couple of million would smooth the Morgan Art Foundation’s feathers just fine.