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Putting LA at the heart of world culture

USA

Chapeau : Collection: MOCA’s First 30 Years’, featuring more than 500 highlights from the museum’s collection, opens on November 15

Source : Culture Europe International (http://www.culture-europe-international.org)
01 49 40 72 46 - contact@culture-europe-international.org
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Rubrique : Revue de presse

du 13/11/2009 00:00 au 13/02/2010 00:00
Paris 75007 France (Ile-de-France)



Texte : Par PETER ASPDEN
The Financial Times
USA
November 6th, 2009
(extracts)

Eli Broad, art collector, philanthropist and property billionaire (...) may be one of the most successful businessmen of his generation but he sounds like he has had his fill of money-making.(...)

Next weekend marks the 30th birthday of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.(...) The occasion also commemorates the museum’s renaissance. A year ago, it announced that it was facing a financial crisis. Its spending was outstripping its revenue, and it was dipping into its endowment.

Broad stepped in. He pledged $30m to the museum, via the foundation he founded with his wife Edythe. More important still, he launched an appeal to his fellow citizens to play their part in restoring to health one of the most important contemporary art institutions in the world. His words were pungent: “This is not a one-philanthropist town,” he wrote in the LA Times. Saving MOCA, he said, had to become “one of our civic priorities”.(...)

At the heart of his donation and support is a determination to put his adopted city at the heart of world culture: to make it, in his own words, “the most important city for contemporary art in the world”, and a must-visit cultural destination. “LA is really, in my view, one of the four major cultural capitals of the world, together with New York, London and Paris. But the number of people that we get as cultural tourists is a fraction of those cities. Why? Because people don’t realise what we have.

“In the performing arts, no one has a greater symphony hall or symphony orchestra than we do. We have great opera with [the LA Opera general director] Plácido Domingo. We’ve got more theatrical productions than New York or London – admittedly they’re all spread out. And then there are all the great museums we have here. Los Angeles is in the process of changing – and we’ve got to do a better job at communicating what we have to the rest of the world.”(...)

I ask what he thinks of the European model of state support for the arts and he shrugs enviously. “I wish we had it here, it would make my life a lot easier! When I recruited Pontus Hultén [MOCA’s founding director] from the Pompidou, he was accustomed to going to the culture minister once a year, being very charming, and getting an allocation of funds for the year. That was his fundraising. When he came here, I had to drag him around to breakfasts, lunches, cocktail hours, dinners, to raise money. It’s hard work.”

It seems to be surprisingly hard in LA, I say, where the art world and the entertainment industry don’t seem to mix terribly well. I read out a quote by Larry Gagosian that asks why people would bother to go to a cocktail party at an art gallery in LA when they can have lunch with Jack Nicholson any time they like.

“Maybe we’ll get Jack Nicholson to the museum,” replies Broad, quick as a flash. “Or people like him. We’re going to do that.” He says he is looking for a “great, exciting director” for MOCA – “not just an art historian, but someone who, frankly, will sell in the entertainment community.”(...)

www.MOCA.org

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Date de publication : 13/11/2009


Période traitée : 2009-11-04
Mots-clés : Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Eli Broad, MOCA,
Inséré le : 13/11/2009 12:22