UCLA Broad Art Center opens! "LA is one of the great art capitals of the world"

[citywatch]

I just realize the writer of the NY Times article could have inserted a mention of the survey done by Business Week. If he didn't know about that story, then excluding it isn't too surprising. But if he did, then leaving it out was a missed opportunity. However, his article seems mainly interested in the way that tourism is affected by a city's cultural scene, so that probably was the key determinant in what was seen as relevant.

[bobcat]

Originally Posted by fflint

I'd love to see the statistics you're using to draw your conclusions here.

Here's the complete report on the survey which was referenced in the article.

http://www.seemyla.com/pdf/LACulturalTourismStudy.pdf

[dragonsky]

Amateurs give dance a whirl at Music Center
Hundreds are eager to get into the swing of a variety of dance styles. After all, lessons are only $1 a session.
By Martha Groves, Times Staff Writer
March 25, 2007

Amateur hoofers turned out by the hundreds Saturday at Music Center plaza for a daylong program aimed at getting people off their duffs and onto the dance floor.

Under a cloudy sky, youngsters from Culver City, college students from Claremont and grandmothers from Los Angeles clogged, tapped, hustled and jitterbugged their way through A Taste of Dance, a Music Center event celebrating diverse ways of moving by offering dance lessons at $1 for a 20-minute session.

Awkward types with two left feet were well in evidence, but so were budding Freds and Gingers.

Yvonne Dowd, 61, a grandmother of three from Hyde Park, and her aunt, June Kimble, also 61, got their grooves on in a modern jazz session taught by Robert Gilliam, a well-regarded Los Angeles dancer and choreographer. They wore jeans and comfortable shoes, the better to glide across the floor and shake their, um, stuff.

"I had come before and had such a great time, so I brought my aunt," Dowd said. "We want to enjoy life. Any time there's an opportunity to do something different, we take it."

"It's good to keep the ol' body moving," Kimble said.

As country music vied for air space with Beyonc–'s "Crazy in Love" and Native American drum music, professional dancers taught the basics of a dozen dance forms, including the Texas two-step and steppin', popularized — in much more raucous form — by the movie "Stomp the Yard."

Leza Williams, 10, and her sister, Nia, 8, of Culver City glowed as they hip-hopped from floor to floor. "It was fun," Nia said.

"You have to have some strength and be flowy," she added, raising her arm gracefully to demonstrate a jazz move.

Hilary Lowe, 21, a senior at Scripps College in Claremont, invited three friends to join her for a dance day in the city. One, Katie Tutwiler, 22, also a Scripps senior, said the two-step lesson reminded her of the Cajun dancing she grew up doing in Louisiana.

Occasionally, tripping the light fantastic took on a literal meaning as children and adults tried out moves better suited to, say, Savion Glover.

A Taste of Dance is part of a year-round Music Center program called Active Arts, which includes Saturday morning drumming sessions and Friday night sing-alongs.

The events, held through December, are designed to get everyday people "singing, dancing, playing their instruments again and telling their stories," said Josephine Ramirez, vice president of programming. "Participatory art-making activities are a way to engage people in civic life."

David Goldstein, 51, whose dance-loving mother accompanied him from Chatsworth, couldn't have agreed more. Wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, he displayed a great deal of enthusiasm, if not always swanlike grace.

"I like the variety of dancers and the smiling faces," he said. "It is wonderful. And for $1 a lesson, you just can't beat it."

[fflint]

Originally Posted by bobcat

Here's the complete report on the survey which was referenced in the article.

http://www.seemyla.com/pdf/LACulturalTourismStudy.pdf

According to that link, 3 million LA tourists, or 22% of the total, are cultural tourists. Meanwhile, San Diego sees 2.7 million (21%) cultural tourists, and San Francisco sees 2.1 million (25%) cultural tourists. LA has it by the numbers, but SF has it by percentages, and San Diego is a contender in both raw numbers and percentages. The claim that LA is the one singular cultural destination in the Western US is not supported by these numbers.

[bobcat]

^I tried to clarify my earlier statement by saying I felt that LA drew the largest number of cultural tourists of any city in the Western region, and the data does support that view, although SD does very well also. Good for them. I never meant to say that I thought it drew high percentages of cultural tourists relative to its overall number of visitors because I never believed it did. I always figured that someplace like Santa Fe NM would draw a disproportionately high number of cultural tourists relative to the much larger cities.

[dragonsky]

March 28, 2007
Resiliency is built into LACMA’s redesign
Renzo Piano calmly proceeds, despite returns to the drawing board and elements pulling focus from his architecture.


A $25-million gift from petroleum company BP prompted a new idea: an open-air entry hall with rooftop solar panels.

By Christopher Hawthorne, Times Staff Writer

In the last decade or so, we have learned to think of new museum buildings as a form of architectural entertainment — the more easily understandable, the better. The architecture itself may be elaborate (Libeskind in Denver, Herzog & de Meuron in Minneapolis) or refined (SANAA in New York, Gluckman in San Diego), but the aesthetic statement is almost always straightforward, the authorship of the buildings impossible to miss. Museum directors, as they pursue expansion, have been willing to sell off paintings and even trim their curatorial staffs. But cover up the architectural logo? Never.

That helps explain why the recent changes to Renzo Piano's expansion plans for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seem so surprising, or at least so resistant to quick analysis. They are likely to make the experience of visiting LACMA richer even as they embrace a pop sensibility and veer close to some New York clich–s about California culture. And in bringing art and corporate identity to the foreground, they dim the spotlight on pricey, name-brand architecture.

The first phase of the expansion, budgeted at $156 million, includes a new parking garage, an expanded garden and two buildings by Piano along Wilshire Boulevard: a simple entry pavilion, which the architect originally modeled on L.A.'s Case Study houses, and the travertine-wrapped Broad Contemporary Art Museum, or BCAM.

Orchestrated by Michael Govan, who took over as LACMA director last year, the updates to the extension operate on two tracks. The first has to do with fundraising and programming. With some help from Eli Broad, Govan landed a $25-million gift from BP that will transform the pavilion into an open-air entry hall with solar panels on the roof — and the British oil company's name on the front. He then persuaded Lynda and Stewart Resnick, whose own $25-million gift was originally earmarked for the pavilion, to direct it instead to the construction of a new single-story gallery building by Piano directly behind BCAM. It will be part of the expansion's second phase, which will also include updates to the former May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax, known as LACMA West.

Even while executing that sleight of hand, Govan was recruiting artists to fill in the spaces around and in front of Piano's buildings. Surrounding BCAM like a wreath — or a playful chokehold — will be a palm garden by Robert Irwin, who proved with his garden at the Getty Center that he is hardly shy about confronting architectural celebrity. And just in front of the BP structure will be Jeff Koons' "Train," a massive artwork that includes a 70-foot locomotive dangling from a 160-foot crane.

Compared with Piano's earliest plans, the result, at least as Govan sees it, will be a museum more playful, more colorful and more comfortable with the fact that it is located in Southern California. The open-air pavilion will operate not just as a pathway into the galleries but also as a more conspicuous entry to the museum's parkland and sculpture gardens, which Piano's design extends to the north and west.

Govan's LACMA will also reduce the emphasis on the Piano brand. Recruited by Broad to replace Rem Koolhaas, whose aggressive scheme to remake the museum foundered on fundraising shoals, Piano brought his usual focus on clarity and refinement to the LACMA plan. He drew a thick east-west axis connecting LACMA West to the rest of the museum. And he filled out the BCAM design, the heart of his proposal's first phase, with broad, strong gestures. H-shaped in plan, the building will show art on three high-ceilinged, column-free floors.

But Piano had been working to loosen up his architecture for a Los Angeles audience long before Govan arrived here from the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Early on, he attached a bright red escalator and stairs to the exterior of the blocky BCAM building and endorsed the idea of draping billboard-scale tapestries across its Wilshire facade. He tried to channel Charles and Ray Eames and Pierre Koenig in the entry pavilion. Not since he and Richard Rogers designed the 1977 Pompidou Center in Paris, Piano said last year, had he so fully embraced levity and color in a museum design.

For Govan, clearly, that effort didn't go far enough. Bringing Irwin and Koons on board will add some pop energy, a sense of humor and a touch of irreverence to the new LACMA buildings. Both the Koons train and the Irwin palm garden — but especially the train — carry heavy symbolic weight and a sensibility that couldn't be more different from Piano's work. The architect's recent projects stress rationality, the careful manipulation of light and a seamless, elegant marriage of technology and design. The train, which hangs perpendicular to the ground, seems to be hurtling straight at the pavement, ready to smash all those ideas to bits.

In part — and there is really no getting around this fact — the new elements also serve to camouflage Piano's architecture.

The architect himself, ever charming and unflappable, betrayed no anxiety about the new plan as he walked through the still-skeletal BCAM recently wearing a white hard hat. He praised Govan as a client, and it's easy to imagine that on an intellectual level, at the very least, the new director is a compelling sparring partner. To a different architect — younger, more aggressive, less sure of himself — Govan's changes might have been deeply threatening and maybe even cause for walking off the job altogether.

But just as there were risks in Piano's attempts to ground his LACMA design in L.A. culture — the connection to the Case Study program, for example, was a bit strained from the start — there are in Govan's as well. Any New York art expert ready to catalog the joys of Southern California — the sunshine! the scent of tropical flowers! all those cars on all those boulevards! — has to be careful not to alienate the locals with that very enthusiasm.

We should be glad, then, that Govan is at least polished enough not to resort to the crumbling clich–s we heard last week from Alanna Heiss, the director of the Queens, N.Y.-based MoMA affiliate P.S. 1. Heiss and P.S. 1 hold an annual competition to pick an architect to decorate the museum's courtyard during the summer. This year, the winner was a team made up of two 38-year-old architects from L.A., Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues.

Praising their design in the New York Times, Heiss said, "It seemed to us East Coast people really a present from the wilderness of California dreams."

We West Coast people hardly know where to begin with that phrase: the wilderness of California dreams. (I would have loved to run it by Milton Wexler, the analyst who worked for so many years with Frank Gehry and died two weeks ago at 98.) At the very least, if anyone wants to organize a conference on the theme of California art and architecture as seen through the lens of New York provincialism, we have a ready title.

Govan arrived in that wilderness last year with a deep supply of architectural credibility, having overseen the planning for Dia's outpost in Beacon, N.Y., along the Hudson River. In that 2003 project, Govan — working with Irwin and the New York architecture firm Open Office — turned an old Nabisco factory into one of the best new museum spaces to open anywhere in the last decade. Avoiding architectural fireworks, it is marked by a keen sense of proportion and light and a scrupulous attention to detail. Its success should buy Govan some time to execute his own vision here.

Still, there are few expansion projects in the country with more moving parts and a more tangled history than the one he has inherited at LACMA. Even if the first two phases come off cleanly — and that remains a pretty big "if" — there is the looming question of how to handle the jumble of buildings to the east: the Ahmanson, the Bing and the Hammer, not to mention the courtyards and staircases that connect and encircle them. Those buildings will be more resistant to architectural unification than the west side of the campus has been; figuring out what do with them is precisely where Govan will earn his keep.

[Vangelist]

Wow

[dragonsky]

March 29, 2007
Fake fame, genuine fun
The tribute bands at Burbank Bar & Grille get the crowd excited.



By Lina Lecaro, Special to The Times

Who doesn't love tribute bands? OK, a lot of people. Seems as if half the world thinks the wigs and costumes and zany personas, if not the music, are cheesy. And the other half is in retro heaven, especially if the performers are charismatic and the covers are tight. There certainly are more of the latter on Fridays and Saturdays at the Burbank Bar & Grille. In fact, the crowds are every bit as animated for '80s band Video Star (Fridays) and multi-era wonders Decades (Saturdays) as they are in Hollywood for Metal Skool Mondays at the Key Club and the Spazzmatics Sundays at the Dragonfly.

Only this is Burbank.

Located along San Fernando Boulevard, a street dotted by eateries and shops, the 10-year-old BB&G is a place where office workers stop by after work to sip cocktails and nibble on appetizers. As the night goes on, a mix of local twenty- to fortysomethings stop in looking for dancing — and, judging from the body language at the bar — romancing.

There is karaoke Sundays and Thursdays, and for those who prefer a mellower vibe, owner Tom Shayman provides a patio area featuring acoustic music seven nights a week.

But it's the flashing lights and familiar anthems that burst from BB&G's corner stage that make the room hustle.

The new wave, pop and rock of the '80s still seem to be the favorite (Video Star attracts the biggest crowd), but Decades' concept is far more interesting. The band, essentially the same lineup as Friday, offers three sets sporting three distinct looks — '70s songs complete with bell-bottoms, '80s music with Duran Duran hairdos and '90s hip-hop hits done rock 'n' roll style.

On a recent Saturday, Decades got the tiny dance floor pumping and chuckling with lots of zany repartee, particularly during the '80s set. The pouty singer applied lip gloss on stage, while the bassist cracked wise, then the group launched into the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun." It's silly, but after a few beers, amusing. It would fall flat if the band weren't spot on.

Guitarist Matt Fuller, whose "real" rock band Spy Camera plays clubs like Viper Room and Safari Sam's, says it's fun to let loose in Burbank. "People from Hollywood might not come here too often," he says, "but people from all over the city do — the Valley, Pasadena, Whittier, South Bay. It's a real mix."

Shayman says much of his daytime and early evening crowds tend to be from nearby studios: Warner Bros., Disney, DreamWorks, NBC. "After tapings, this is where they all come," he says.

And with the madcap time machine after dark, it's no wonder many come back for more.

Burbank Bar & Grille
Where: 112 N. San Fernando Blvd., Burbank
When: Open 11 a.m. to close seven days a week
What: Full dinner menu; late-night appetizers, $4 to $18; draft beer, $4; well drinks, $3
Info: (818) 848-9611; www.bbgrocks.com

[dragonsky]

USC innovation institute reinventing itself
Officials expand effort begun in 2004 to nurture ideas that will benefit all sectors of society, rather than just focusing on engineering.
By Angie Green, Times Staff Writer
March 29, 2007

University of Southern California officials say they have a new way of developing creative ideas that their students and faculty dream up. School officials announced Wednesday that USC is the first major research university with an institute that acts as a university-wide, centralized hub for nurturing inventions as well as inventors.

The institute — which was previously called the USC Stevens Institute for Technology Commercialization — was renamed the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation to reflect its shift to include innovations from all academic disciplines.

Established in 2004, the institute was originally designed to help advance engineering after USC alumnus and venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife, Mary, donated $22 million to the campus unit.

Stevens said Wednesday that over the next two years the idea grew to a larger vision with a "broader and more aggressive role" for the institute.

"We decided to make this a campuswide resource," said Stevens, who acknowledged that the institute's new mission and plans are still in the early stages. "This is a start-up." He added that the project is "full of unknowns, but that's what makes it exciting."

Traditionally, schools tend to focus on inventions and ideas connected to science and technology and ignore others, but officials said all disciplines must be included for maximum benefit to the public's quality of life. Innovative ideas could also include nonprofit organizations that aid a community. For example, many years ago, a USC professor from the School of Policy, Planning and Development developed the concept of the neighborhood council, according to the institute's director.

The institute's 17-member staff will help develop ideas from various areas, such as media, social work, fine arts and medicine.

The mission is about "nurturing ideas and inventions that would benefit society the most," USC President Steven B. Sample said.

An example of that objective was on display Wednesday as USC School of Dentistry professor Paul C. Denny chatted about how he developed a saliva test that predicts a child's genetic-based propensity for developing cavities.

The invention is being reviewed by the FDA for approval.

"It was my opportunity to do something for people," Denny said. "It was like it was a gift."

About a dozen other inventions by faculty members, some which have been years in the works, were on display at the Davidson Conference Center on Wednesday. The institute has supported the projects through promotion and licensing.

One invention teaches U.S. soldiers cultural awareness through an interactive, 3-D videogame that simulates real social interactions with Iraqi civilians. The invention, which has been used by members of the U.S. military, shows soldiers nonverbal gestures and norms, such as placing your hand over your heart when greeting an Iraqi.

In the spirit of innovation, Provost C.L. Max Nikias also announced he wants to develop in the next year a minor in innovation for all doctoral students, regardless of their discipline.

"I want innovation to be the signature for the USC PhD diploma," Nikias said.

To oversee the institute's new effort, USC officials last year recruited Krisztina Holly, a former director of an innovation center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Holly, a vice provost who said plans call for the USC institute to grow to a 30-member staff by 2008, said one of the institute's main goals will be to develop the creative thinking — and not just the inventions — of students and faculty.

If one of USC's 33,000 students has an idea, he or she should contact the institute that is housed in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering and speak with an innovator developer to determine if the idea has merit.

Staff at the institute may then encourage the student to take a course in innovation or entrepreneurship or attend one of the institute's workshops.

The institute staff also plans to offer advice on how to protect, license and patent the idea as well as introduce inventors to volunteer mentors from the community. Awards, grants and educational programs will soon be announced to support student innovators, Holly said.

However, while the institute has several ambitious plans, Holly admits most are in their conceptual stage.

"It is operating in unchartered territory," Holly said to a crowd of about 100 students, faculty members and school officials who came to hear the institute's new plans. "We have no road map, and we think that's great."

[dragonsky]

April 5, 2007
Sleight is a real sight
It'll be magicians out of a hat when the Academy of Magical Arts hands out awards.



By Geoff Boucher, Times Staff Writer

It was easier in the old days. Wave the wand, pull a rabbit out of the hat, saw a showgirl in half and, presto, the crowd went nuts.

But in the era of digital disbelief, magic is a much tougher sell. How do you make it better than the science of CGI, Photoshop and virtual reality?

Fortunately, a few old-school prestidigitators and illusionists still have something up their sleeve: A&E's "Criss Angel Mindfreak," Penn & Teller, David Blaine's quirky, public isolationist stunts, and assorted Las Vegas magic-themed spectacles come to mind. And then there's the Academy of Magical Arts. Based at the Magic Castle, a private club with a storied Hollywood history (Johnny Carson, Cary Grant and Steve Martin are among the "celebrity hobbyists" who have performed there), the academy has been the hub of the magic industry since the 1960s. And this Saturday, it will host its 39th Annual Academy of Magical Arts Awards Show at the Beverly Hilton, with tickets available to the public.

Celebrity presenters will include Martin, Mandy Patinkin, Buzz Aldrin, J.J. Abrams, Doris Roberts and Eric Roberts. But the real star is magic, with performances by Shimshi (whose specialty is "high-energy manipulation and cutting-edge illusion"), comedy magician Chris Kenner, and cabaret magician Paul Potassy, an acclaimed figure in magic circles who lives in the Philippines and has not performed in the United States for five decades.

Variety is the watchword; there will be exhibitions by classic illusionist and "dove-worker" Chen Kai from Mexico and John Cassidy, who is billed as balloon sculptor of highest order. Carl Ballantine, the popular comedy magician (familiar to rerun-watchers as a cast member of "McHale's Navy") will receive a lifetime achievement honor. Another familiar television star, Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, is a nominee in the category of parlor magic after his recent sold-out performances at the Castle.

The award show's executive producer, Dale R. Hindman, said the public fascination with stage magic is cyclical and, to his eyes, is building toward another peak. The "Harry Potter" books and films get some credit for piquing the interest of young, would-be sorcerers, but to Hindman the biggest force of magic right now is the Internet. "Just look at what Cyril has done."

That would be Cyril Takayama, who will be honored Saturday with the prestigious magician of the year award. Takayama is "Magic's first Cyber-Celebrity," according to Magic magazine, and he has used the short-form ethos of YouTube and other websites to create quick-hit magic marvels. A big draw in Japan and a presence on Korean television, his success is a local story too: Takayama is a graduate of the Castle's juniors program: "We call it the real Hogwarts," noted Hindman.

The magician community is a quirky fraternity, and the Castle and the awards show put a premium on preserving its history, which is why you can find Harry Houdini's manacles and straitjacket in one room of the Castle as well as one of the world's premier libraries of magic. But beware dissing that history: When Blaine didn't show up to receive his magician of the year honor in 2002, the award was banished to a Castle bathroom, where it still awaits him. When the "Masked Magician" had a Fox series revealing the methods behind famous tricks, the taboo-breaker was drummed out of the industry. "I hope he made a lot of money off that show, because he's not making any more in magic," Hindman said.

Last week, Hindman watched a jaw-dropping lunchtime performance by Bob Jardine, a magician who's a familiar face in Vegas circles. The performance was about as low-tech as magic gets — a deck of cards, a couple of rubber bands and a fork — but it was an irresistible display of classic, up-close magic. Hindman believes that timeless fascination with sleight of hand endures despite the evolution of special effects: "When you're there watching a magician on stage, you know there's no CGI and it's as entertaining as it always has been. This year we have real international representation at the show, and one of the reasons is magic translates to all languages and every generation."

[dragonsky]

New York Times
Friday, April 6, 2007
A Museum Takes StepsTo Collect Houses
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: March 15, 2007

Shortly after moving here last year to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan started looking at houses -- not as a place for him to live but as potential museum pieces.

His idea -- one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum -- is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators.

While he has yet to acquire any properties, Mr. Govan said this week that he certainly had his eye on some, including Frank Gehry's landmark residence in Santa Monica, a collage of tilting forms. In an interview Mr. Gehry confirmed that Mr. Govan had discussed the idea with him but said that no agreements about the house's future had been reached.

Mr. Govan, who moved here in March 2006 from New York, where he directed the Dia Art Foundation, said his project had been driven by the immediate impression that in Los Angeles, a city defined by outdoor spaces, architecture is inseparable from art.

''It started with an effort to rethink the museum, looking at the resources that are both locally powerful and internationally relevant,'' he said. ''It's clear that the most important architecture in Los Angeles is largely its domestic architecture. I've talked certainly to a number of people who have interesting architecture, and I'm beginning to talk to other people about raising funds to preserve these works.''

The potential cost of the houses varies widely. Many of the most distinctive properties, in Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills, have most recently sold for millions of dollars. Others, like Schindler's Buck House, on Eighth Street, barely two blocks from the museum, sold for less than half a million dollars in 1995, although it clearly would be worth more than double that today.

Mr. Govan was reluctant to discuss his plans in detail, partly because he has taken only ''baby steps,'' he said, but also because he does not want to set off bidding wars for houses in which he is interested. He said he hoped the museum could either buy houses or have them donated, the same ways that a museum would go about acquiring paintings or sculptures.

''This whole initiative will depend on generosity,'' he said. ''In the same way that someone would donate a Picasso, we want people to think of ways to see these houses as works of art and to think about ways to preserve them.''

Although he said he had received an ''enthusiastic response'' when he presented the idea to the museum's trustees, ''we have no funds at the moment'' dedicated to the effort, he added.

But the idea has already started to generate chatter in the architecture community here. Richard Koshalek, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, said Mr. Govan's effort was ''not only crucial for the city of Los Angeles but for the history of modern architecture.''

''Architects learn from other architects,'' Mr. Koshalek said. ''This history will be lost if people like Michael do not take this kind of initiative.''

While owning an architecturally significant house in Los Angeles has long carried a certain cachet, many potentially valuable works have fallen into disrepair or been greatly altered by renovations undertaken by a succession of owners.

''A number of them haven't been touched,'' Mr. Govan said. ''But many have been badly renovated and fundamentally changed. So I think it's kind of the last chance to try to preserve a group of these as a collection.''

Mr. Govan's idea is perhaps all the more remarkable because the Los Angeles County Museum does not have a department of architecture or design, unlike some older institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But one of the museum's first acquisitions after Mr. Govan moved to Los Angeles, after 12 years as director of Dia, was a high-rise office interior by the Modernist architect John Lautner.

The Lautner office was formerly owned by James F. Goldstein, a real-estate investor who had Lautner design the space in 1987 for the 20th floor in a building in Century City, the commercial development on Santa Monica Boulevard in west Los Angeles.

In 2005 Mr. Goldstein was informed that his lease for the space would not be renewed, and a foundation devoted to saving Lautner works began seeking a patron who would preserve the space.

The Los Angeles County Museum initially turned down the proposal because museum officials felt it did not have the room to display the 800-square-foot office. But once Mr. Govan arrived, he seized the opportunity to acquire the work for an undisclosed amount and use it not as an exhibit but as an office -- specifically, his.

The museum now plans to install the office, which includes copper walls, a wood ceiling and a floor of black slate, as part of the renovation of the May Company building, a former department store that is on the western edge of the museum's 20-acre campus on Wilshire Boulevard. That renovation is planned for 2008 or 2009, and Mr. Govan said he hoped to use the space as his regular office, allowing visitors access to it as an exhibit on weekends.

Similarly, he said he hoped to use the houses that he collects not strictly as museum pieces but as housing for museum staff members, a perk that he said he believed would help the museum attract new curatorial talent.

''A lot of curators here have sought out interesting houses,'' he said. ''I thought, 'You could just have house tours on a regular basis to allow the public to have access to them.' ''

Although it does not have a design collection as such, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has hardly ignored the city's architectural history. In 1987 it organized a tour in the Silver Lake community of houses by Schindler, Neutra and other architects of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s. In 1965 the museum published ''A Guide to Southern California Architecture,'' a book that, although out of print, is prized by real-estate agents here who specialize in architectural gems.

Various Los Angeles organizations have also sponsored tours of houses that were built as part of the Case Study program: two dozen prototypes of modern architecture, by Charles and Ray Eames, Neutra and Pierre Koenig, among others, that were commissioned by Art & Architecture magazine and built from 1945 to 1964.

Silver Lake, an area around a man-made reservoir in the hills east of Hollywood, is the site of dozens of houses that would be potential acquisitions for the museum. The 2200 block of Silver Lake Boulevard, for example, has no fewer than five houses by Neutra, who was encouraged to migrate from Vienna to Los Angeles by Schindler, who was himself born in Austria and had worked in Chicago and Los Angeles as a construction supervisor for Frank Lloyd Wright.

Schindler's work is also ubiquitous around Los Angeles. In 2001 the magazine ArtForum listed 32 significant works by Schindler, several in the parts of Los Angeles that visitors to the city rarely get to, including Torrance, Glendale, South Central and Woodland Hills.

Mr. Govan said that because the institution was a county museum, he did not intend to limit his collection to the area immediately around the museum's west Los Angeles location.

With Mr. Govan's plans already being discussed in architecture and real estate circles, the museum is certain to face some competition to acquire properties, including that ofMr. Gehry. His Santa Monica house, built in 1978 and remodeled in 1993, is known for its distinctive exteriors, which include corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing.

It is also in the sights of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mr. Gehry said, which has talked to him about its registering the house or acquiring it once he completes a new residence in nearby Venice, Calif.

''In the meantime,'' Mr. Gehry said, ''I'm living in it.''

[ocman]

Originally Posted by dragonsky

New York Times
Friday, April 6, 2007
A Museum Takes StepsTo Collect Houses
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: March 15, 2007

Shortly after moving here last year to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan started looking at houses -- not as a place for him to live but as potential museum pieces.

His idea -- one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum -- is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators.

While he has yet to acquire any properties, Mr. Govan said this week that he certainly had his eye on some, including Frank Gehry's landmark residence in Santa Monica, a collage of tilting forms. In an interview Mr. Gehry confirmed that Mr. Govan had discussed the idea with him but said that no agreements about the house's future had been reached.

Mr. Govan, who moved here in March 2006 from New York, where he directed the Dia Art Foundation, said his project had been driven by the immediate impression that in Los Angeles, a city defined by outdoor spaces, architecture is inseparable from art.

''It started with an effort to rethink the museum, looking at the resources that are both locally powerful and internationally relevant,'' he said. ''It's clear that the most important architecture in Los Angeles is largely its domestic architecture. I've talked certainly to a number of people who have interesting architecture, and I'm beginning to talk to other people about raising funds to preserve these works.''

The potential cost of the houses varies widely. Many of the most distinctive properties, in Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills, have most recently sold for millions of dollars. Others, like Schindler's Buck House, on Eighth Street, barely two blocks from the museum, sold for less than half a million dollars in 1995, although it clearly would be worth more than double that today.

Mr. Govan was reluctant to discuss his plans in detail, partly because he has taken only ''baby steps,'' he said, but also because he does not want to set off bidding wars for houses in which he is interested. He said he hoped the museum could either buy houses or have them donated, the same ways that a museum would go about acquiring paintings or sculptures.

''This whole initiative will depend on generosity,'' he said. ''In the same way that someone would donate a Picasso, we want people to think of ways to see these houses as works of art and to think about ways to preserve them.''

Although he said he had received an ''enthusiastic response'' when he presented the idea to the museum's trustees, ''we have no funds at the moment'' dedicated to the effort, he added.

But the idea has already started to generate chatter in the architecture community here. Richard Koshalek, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, said Mr. Govan's effort was ''not only crucial for the city of Los Angeles but for the history of modern architecture.''

''Architects learn from other architects,'' Mr. Koshalek said. ''This history will be lost if people like Michael do not take this kind of initiative.''

While owning an architecturally significant house in Los Angeles has long carried a certain cachet, many potentially valuable works have fallen into disrepair or been greatly altered by renovations undertaken by a succession of owners.

''A number of them haven't been touched,'' Mr. Govan said. ''But many have been badly renovated and fundamentally changed. So I think it's kind of the last chance to try to preserve a group of these as a collection.''

Mr. Govan's idea is perhaps all the more remarkable because the Los Angeles County Museum does not have a department of architecture or design, unlike some older institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But one of the museum's first acquisitions after Mr. Govan moved to Los Angeles, after 12 years as director of Dia, was a high-rise office interior by the Modernist architect John Lautner.

The Lautner office was formerly owned by James F. Goldstein, a real-estate investor who had Lautner design the space in 1987 for the 20th floor in a building in Century City, the commercial development on Santa Monica Boulevard in west Los Angeles.

In 2005 Mr. Goldstein was informed that his lease for the space would not be renewed, and a foundation devoted to saving Lautner works began seeking a patron who would preserve the space.

The Los Angeles County Museum initially turned down the proposal because museum officials felt it did not have the room to display the 800-square-foot office. But once Mr. Govan arrived, he seized the opportunity to acquire the work for an undisclosed amount and use it not as an exhibit but as an office -- specifically, his.

The museum now plans to install the office, which includes copper walls, a wood ceiling and a floor of black slate, as part of the renovation of the May Company building, a former department store that is on the western edge of the museum's 20-acre campus on Wilshire Boulevard. That renovation is planned for 2008 or 2009, and Mr. Govan said he hoped to use the space as his regular office, allowing visitors access to it as an exhibit on weekends.

Similarly, he said he hoped to use the houses that he collects not strictly as museum pieces but as housing for museum staff members, a perk that he said he believed would help the museum attract new curatorial talent.

''A lot of curators here have sought out interesting houses,'' he said. ''I thought, 'You could just have house tours on a regular basis to allow the public to have access to them.' ''

Although it does not have a design collection as such, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has hardly ignored the city's architectural history. In 1987 it organized a tour in the Silver Lake community of houses by Schindler, Neutra and other architects of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s. In 1965 the museum published ''A Guide to Southern California Architecture,'' a book that, although out of print, is prized by real-estate agents here who specialize in architectural gems.

Various Los Angeles organizations have also sponsored tours of houses that were built as part of the Case Study program: two dozen prototypes of modern architecture, by Charles and Ray Eames, Neutra and Pierre Koenig, among others, that were commissioned by Art & Architecture magazine and built from 1945 to 1964.

Silver Lake, an area around a man-made reservoir in the hills east of Hollywood, is the site of dozens of houses that would be potential acquisitions for the museum. The 2200 block of Silver Lake Boulevard, for example, has no fewer than five houses by Neutra, who was encouraged to migrate from Vienna to Los Angeles by Schindler, who was himself born in Austria and had worked in Chicago and Los Angeles as a construction supervisor for Frank Lloyd Wright.

Schindler's work is also ubiquitous around Los Angeles. In 2001 the magazine ArtForum listed 32 significant works by Schindler, several in the parts of Los Angeles that visitors to the city rarely get to, including Torrance, Glendale, South Central and Woodland Hills.

Mr. Govan said that because the institution was a county museum, he did not intend to limit his collection to the area immediately around the museum's west Los Angeles location.

With Mr. Govan's plans already being discussed in architecture and real estate circles, the museum is certain to face some competition to acquire properties, including that ofMr. Gehry. His Santa Monica house, built in 1978 and remodeled in 1993, is known for its distinctive exteriors, which include corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing.

It is also in the sights of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mr. Gehry said, which has talked to him about its registering the house or acquiring it once he completes a new residence in nearby Venice, Calif.

''In the meantime,'' Mr. Gehry said, ''I'm living in it.''

A few Neutras a couple years back were selling for 2 million, which is a steal. I'd love for LACMA to acquire the Case Study series and open it up to the public. So many private gems in LA that few know about. It would bring to the forefront the importance of LA modernism.

[ocman]

Esa-Pekka Solonen last season with the LA Philharmonic will be next year. The good news is that we didn't lose him to another orchestra or city. Ha! Other good news is that they already hired a music director, 26 year old Gustavo Dudamel.

About his guest conducting last week with Chicago.

From Tribune:

"But it's no act. Dudamel is for real, a serious musician through and through, the most gifted and exciting newcomer to make music with our orchestra in a very long time. CSO players have been singing his praises all week and Thursday they delivered their very best for a conductor they clearly admire."


From Sun-Times:

"Barely 26, Gustavo Dudamel hails from Venezuela, a land more associated with baseball and the politics of oil than classical music. But when he made his local debut Thursday night at Symphony Center, 2,400 jaws dropped, including those of many members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.This was a once-in-a-generation event: A conductor showed what happens when talent, charisma, excitement, daring and believe it or not in a world of Olympian egos, warmth and kindness take the stage. An electrical charge ran through the hall and its buzz didn't stop even after a wild, long ovation."




Maestro of Los Angeles Philharmonic to Pass the Baton to a Wunderkind

By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: April 9, 2007

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the onetime wunderkind from Finland who has led the Los Angeles Philharmonic as music director for 15 seasons, has decided to leave the orchestra when his term ends in 2009. His successor? A wunderkind from Venezuela named Gustavo Dudamel, one of the hottest — and youngest — conducting properties around.


Gustavo Dudamel

Mr. Dudamel, 26, is a product of his country’s extraordinary youth orchestra system, founded three decades ago to help disadvantaged youngsters. It has grown into a network of scores of ensembles, training hundreds of thousands of musicians. He is music director of its capstone, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, which he joined as a violinist at 11.

In the last few years Mr. Dudamel, who becomes principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony of Sweden next season, has had the world’s major orchestras in hot pursuit. He has had, or is scheduled to have, guest appearances at the Berlin, New York and Vienna Philharmonics, the London Philharmonia and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. He also records for Deutsche Grammophon. His United States debut came with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Hollywood Bowl, in 2005.

His influential mentors include the conductors Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado.

When he takes over as music director in Los Angeles in September 2009, Mr. Dudamel will be all of 28, three years younger than Mr. Salonen was when he won the job.

Mr. Salonen, now 48 and also the product of a country that places great weight on musical education, said he wanted to devote more time to composition. Under his leadership the orchestra has won acclaim for its playing and inventive programming.

The change was reported yesterday in The Los Angeles Times.

Other major American orchestras are in the throes of a conductor search, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the choice of Mr. Dudamel may put pressure on them to come up with daring and youthful choices of their own.

Mr. Dudamel’s contract is for five years. He begins in September 2009. In his first season he will conduct for 10 weeks and increase to 14 weeks after that.

[ocman]

http://www.calendarlive.com/music/la...?coll=cl-music

Sorry, Chicago, L.A.'s got Dudamel

The L.A. Philharmonic's signing of the coveted Venezuelan conductor sets the classical music world abuzz.

By Chris Pasles, Times Staff Writer

The appointment of 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, beginning in 2009, is already having a ripple effect.

"No!" read several e-mails from disappointed Chicago Symphony musicians, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday. Wrote one of that orchestra's major donors: "I read this story — and wept."

Dudamel, as it happened, had conducted the Chicago Symphony — one of a number of U.S. orchestras searching for a new music director — for the first time last week. Critic Andrew Patner, who reported those reactions, had concluded his review by hoping the orchestra's board members were "carrying pens and contract paper to share with Dudamel before he leaves town."

It was too late. Dudamel had already signed a five-year contract to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic's current music director, who had decided he wanted to devote more time to composing and less to conducting. The orchestra had given Dudamel his U.S. conducting debut at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005 after he won the inaugural Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany, in 2004.

Elsewhere in the classical world, reaction to Dudamel's appointment has been notably positive.

"I think what is happening in L.A. is like an earthquake," composer Osvaldo Golijov said Tuesday. "I admire Esa-Pekka Salonen perhaps more than any other musician of my generation, and I think he has the potential to be the most important composer of the generation. And Gustavo has a charisma we haven't seen since Leonard Bernstein."

Leon Botstein, conductor and president of Bard College, who was a jury member at the Mahler competition, said he and his fellow jurors spotted Dudamel as "a kind of fireball of energy and enthusiasm and talent, and a couple of us had the instinct that he also had that extra zip and personality to make a career.

"The real problem for him, for any wunderkind," Botstein said Tuesday, "is the narcotic of corruption, of attention. He needs to do what J.D. Salinger did, what Philip Roth did: control, if not shun, the limelight, not succumb to it.

"Being a great musician is a matter of time," Botstein added. "Leonard Bernstein was a great conductor — at the end of his life. He was a gifted fireball at the beginning. But this is a wonderful, refreshing appointment. It's good for L.A. and good for him."

"Los Angeles has a history of appointing music directors in their 20s who do very well," said Zarin Mehta, executive director of the New York Philharmonic, whose brother Zubin led the L.A. Phil from 1962 to 1978.

"Gustavo is only 26, but he has a fair amount of experience already. By the time 2009 rolls around, he'll have even more experience. He's a man with his head screwed on right. I'm very impressed with him. He will fit in wonderfully."

At a news conference Monday officially announcing Dudamel's appointment, Salonen said, "I was moved to tears, and so was practically everyone else," by Dudamel's performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony at the Mahler competition. "We realized this was a rare and natural talent that happens every now and then in history, but not very often."

That impression was confirmed, Salonen said, by not only Dudamel's Bowl debut but also a performance of Kodály, Rachmaninoff and Bartók at Walt Disney Concert Hall in January.

"Halfway through the first piece," Salonen said, "I whispered to my wife, 'Jane, this is the man. There's absolutely no question about it.' "

"I'm not a good speaker," Dudamel said at the news conference, where he appeared with his wife, Eloisa. "My English is improving. I hope in one year and a half, two years, it will be really, I hope, a lot better."

Dudamel noted that, though young, he had begun conducting at the age of 12. At 13, he became an assistant conductor and at 17 music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the flagship of the country's extensive music education system.

"I conducted 90 concerts a year," he said. "That gives me some experience, and I am grateful for those opportunities."

He also is principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden and is scheduled to make his debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic next season.

Dudamel said that he wanted to continue Salonen's line of innovative programming but that his own plans for the orchestra would emerge gradually.

"We need to have our honeymoon together to make children. Then we have plenty of time to think about what we want to do," he said. "In the meantime, I will study, eat, run a little bit, maybe swim."

Although formal discussions between Dudamel and the Philharmonic began in January, the search process started "long before that," orchestra President Deborah Borda said in an interview Monday.

"We review every single guest conductor every single time they step on the podium," she said. "I always say, 'Taxes and the music director leaving are inevitable.' Both will happen. You constantly need to be thinking about this and prepare the way so that you have what I call an organic search.

"When the moment comes when the music director steps down for whatever reason, you're in a position to deal with that on an immediate basis. I don't believe in a public horse race. It's very unfortunate for a guest conductor to be publicly evaluated and potentially rejected."

Along with Chicago, the New York Philharmonic is among at least five other U.S. orchestras that will have to continue to look for music directors. Although Mehta refused to talk about its search — including rumors that Dudamel had been in the running — he did wonder whether Salonen might be interested "in taking another directorship."

"I know he said he wants to compose," Mehta said. "But in two years' time, would he want to do that exclusively? Who knows?"

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Judging by the reactions from the critics of Dudamel, I am extremely excited for the LA Phil and can only hope that LA's reputation as a classical music center continues to climb up toward the top ranking symphonies in the world. I think as the Colburn School and the LAUSD Performing Arts School gain recognition, it will also help to bring saliency to Grand Ave. as the next cultural mecca of the United States. Finally, LA will not only be considered a center of pop culture/Hollywood, but also a metropolis of sophistication and refined high-culture.

[citywatch]

^ I saw the following about that bit of news, & have to say it may make up for what probably will happen this Saturday, when a certain town in the US is announced as this country's choice to host the 2016 Olympics. Either that, or it will be a case of rubbing salt in the wound.

‘Say it isn't so' music fans lament
Gustavo Dudamel's triumphant local debut makes pain of losing him worse

April 10, 2007
BY ANDREW PATNER

It was a heartbreak of record speed and strength. Faster than the collapse of the ’69 Cubs. As sad as the sight of the tall girl in ninth grade dancing with that other guy. Thursday night at Symphony Center, Gustavo Dudamel, the sensational 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor, made his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut with a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that grabbed the audience members by the shoulders and lifted them collectively from their seats. The reviews were once-in-a-decade raves.

The phenomenon was repeated on Friday afternoon and Saturday evening. Backstage was jumping with well-wishers, agents, heads of other orchestras and the CSO’s own musicians as it hadn’t since Daniel Barenboim’s farewell concerts or Georg Solti’s retirement as music director.

The Internet was abuzz and speculation was rife that the CSO might be able to work out some arrangement with Dudamel — perhaps a guest conductor role, some residencies, maybe even music director, a daring risk that would have captured the imagination of the classical music world.

And then Easter Sunday morning, the news broke. Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed had the scoop: Esa-Pekka Salonen, a former wunderkind himself, would leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director post in two years and would be succeeded by none other than Gustavo Dudamel.

“No!” read several e-mails I received from CSO musicians. “I read this story — and wept,” wrote a major donor to the orchestra. “Come on, this is Easter Sunday, not April Fools’ Day,” WFMT’s morning host Lisa Flynn said when I called her with the news during her shift.

[dragonsky]

April 12, 2007
Sunset: the boulevard of dreams
Patrick Ecclesine takes Sunset all the way to snap the diverse faces of Angelenos.



By Shana Ting Lipton, Special to The Times

Sunset Boulevard is undoubtedly one of Los Angeles' most famous streets, but does it serve as a connecting thread for the residents of the diverse neighborhoods it passes through on its way from downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean? It's a question photographer Patrick Ecclesine appears poised to answer in his solo exhibit, "Faces of Sunset Boulevard," which opens tonight at Los Angeles City Hall's Bridge Gallery.

In this ongoing personal project consisting of about 100 photographs (24 of which are included in the show), Ecclesine looks to capture L.A.'s dreams, dreamers and, at times, nightmares using the thoroughfare as a focal point for impromptu and set-up portraits of its denizens. He also brought a sound recording device to the photo sessions and did some preliminary interviewing of his subjects to create a fuller story. Quotes from those interviews appear beneath the large prints in the exhibit.

Some of the images capture people on the street — a Bosnian refugee who is now a stand-in on the ABC television show "Grey's Anatomy," a street poet, construction workers, a street vendor. Others depict prominent community workers and leaders such as L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton and attending officers. And still more show Hollywood insiders such as Henry Winkler and writer-producer Steven J. Cannell, as well as a plastic surgeon and a divorce attorney.

Ecclesine describes his hometown as "worlds within worlds within worlds," marveling at what he deems a relatively peaceful coexistence among residents with vast cultural differences.

"To me, Sunset Boulevard is the ultimate representation of that because it's the boulevard of dreams, from the barrio to the beach," he says.

Like Sunset, Ecclesine's life has similarly wound through some diverse quarters. The project has taken him back to his roots. Literally born just off Sunset Boulevard, in the former Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, he spent the first few years of his life residing in a "terrible beat-up ramshackle neighborhood" off Western Avenue.

"It was like a carnival out there," he recalls. "There were Haitian voodoo ceremonies on Saturday nights. There were drug addicts and prostitutes."

More than two decades later, Ecclesine found himself working amid the world of film and TV as a still photographer on the Fox series "The O.C." He recalls having brought his "Faces of Sunset" portfolio to the set, where he met a camera operator who is the brother of 4th District Councilman Tom LaBonge. Ecclesine had begun the "Sunset" project in 2004, but found it difficult to solicit city officials — until LaBonge gave him a certificate of appreciation for his work. That helped open all the right doors, Ecclesine says.

This enabled him to orchestrate some ambitious set-up photo shoots. The one that he is most proud of involved Bratton. The image is one of the few in the show that was not actually taken on Sunset, but rather at a nearby helicopter facility, the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center. It took months of planning and negotiations, and picture-perfect coordination with a strategically hovering helicopter. The catch: Because of hectic city official schedules, the photographer had only about five minutes to capture his shot.

Ecclesine is also proud of the shoot he conducted with the L.A. County coroners.

"People are obsessed with 'CSI,' yet the coroners have never been photographed that way," he says, describing the detailed set-up of his photo, complete with body bag and trucks. "They loved doing that."

So did Ecclesine, who found the set-up productions to be the most challenging of his 170 Sunset project shoots. In addition, he says that shooting subjects who are in the public eye is a challenge because "they have defense mechanisms already in place, because they've dealt with it so many times."

Conversely, he found it easier to photograph street subjects impromptu because "they're in their humanity, in their element."

Regardless, Ecclesine says he appreciates chronicling all walks of life: They're all "part of Los Angeles — the superficial and the deep."

*

'Faces of Sunset Boulevard'
Where: Los Angeles City Hall, Bridge Gallery, 200 N. Spring St., L.A.
When: Opening reception, 8 p.m. April 12. Regular hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays
Ends: May 4
Price: Free, but photo ID required
Info: (323) 314-8000, www.facesofsunset.com

[dragonsky]

April 18, 2007
Art purchases advance Getty's ambitions
A gilded image of Christ and a classic French portrait bulk up the museum's collection.

By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer

A medieval gilt-copper and enamel relief of Christ, thought to have come from a Spanish cathedral, and a 19th century portrait of a lady in her pink velvet dressing gown by French artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot have joined the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The new acquisitions — purchased privately for undisclosed sums in an ongoing effort to build the relatively young institution's art holdings — will go on view in May at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

"This is a fabulous piece," Antonia Bostro"m, curator of sculpture and decorative arts, said of the metal work "Christ in Majesty." About 18 inches tall — an unusually large example of its type — the artwork depicts a seated figure in a glass-jeweled robe, with his right hand raised in a blessing, left hand holding a Bible and feet attached to a rectangular enameled panel. The figure has "a sculptural presence," she says, but it was formed in high relief of a single sheet of copper enhanced by gilding and engraved details.

Made around 1188 in Limoges, France, the artwork was probably designed for the Cathedral of St. Martin in Ourense, in northwest Spain, where Christian pilgrims stopped on their way to Santiago de Compostela, Bostro"m says. The Christ figure is thought to have been part of an altarpiece that was dismantled in the early 19th century, possibly during the Napoleonic Wars. The Getty bought the work from a private collector in Spain.

"Christ in Majesty" initially will be displayed in a gallery of sculpture and decorative arts but it is intended as the centerpiece of a "Cathedral Treasury" expected to open early next year. The installation will be "a sacred space," Bostro"m says, putting the new acquisition in the context of Medieval and Renaissance stained glass, sculpture, decorative arts, paintings and manuscripts.

The Tissot painting, "Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, ne'e The're`se Feuillant," is an 1866 oil-on-canvas from what scholars call the golden age of fashionable portraiture in France. The 30-year-old subject stands by a fireplace in a room of the Cha^teau de Paulhac in the Auvergne, her husband's family seat. She is dressed in a flowing winter peignoir with ruffled borders and is surrounded by decorative objects favored by the rich — a Japanese screen and ceramics, a terra cotta bust of a family member, a Louis XVI stool holding a pile of needlepoint.

The first painting by Tissot to hang in a public collection in Los Angeles, the work will add an example from the Second Empire (1851-1870) to the museum's portraits. The De Young Museum in San Francisco has a Tissot self-portrait of the same period.

The Getty picture was exhibited only once, at the Paris World's Fair in 1867, curators Scott Schaefer and Mary Morton say. The painting was kept in the sitter's family until the museum bought it, through a French dealer.

"It's as fresh and perfect as they come," says conservator Mark Leonard, who cleaned the picture and removed its only flaw, some patches of yellowed varnish. A swatch of pink velvet from the gown, identical to the painted fabric and passed along to the Getty with the artwork, proves the point.

[dragonsky]

Coachella magic
Pop music critic Robert Hilburn lists his all-time favorite performances from the festival.
By Robert Hilburn, Special to the Times
April 27, 2007



The most dramatic moment of this weekend's Coachella festival will surely be when the four members of Rage Against the Machine step on stage together for the first time in seven years, but even that reunion will be hard pressed to match the drama of the politically charged band's initial appearance there.

Rage's tenacious set on the closing night of the inaugural festival in 1999 tops my list of Coachella's memorable moments because the very future of the event hung in the balance.

That first Coachella chapter came just weeks after the trauma of Woodstock 99, a festival in upstate New York so marred by violence that civic authorities and rock fans around the country wondered if massive outdoor concerts were still possible in these hardened times. Even a trace of the lawlessness of Woodstock 99 would have ruled out future Coachellas.

To discourage rowdiness, the festival promoters at Goldenvoice were careful to book quality artists they felt would appeal chiefly to fans who were truly interested in music, not hell-raising. Rage was a superb band that fit the alternative aims of the festival, but it played with such alarming emotion and force that its presence made many who planned to attend Coachella nervous. By the time Rage finished its spectacular performance, however, Coachella's future was secure. It was, in every way, the anti-Woodstock 99.

Here's my best-of-Coachella list:

Rage Against the Machine, 1999. Tension reached a peak near the end of Rage's set as fans in front of the stage moved to the music with alarming force. The band's Zack de la Rocha screamed the closing lines of "Guerrilla Radio," a song about striking back at oppression: "It has to start somewhere / It has to start sometime / What better place than here? / What better time than now?"

With emotions running so high in the audience, the fear was a repeat of the rampaging at Woodstock 99, where, among other things, hundreds of youths set bonfires, tore down at least two 50-foot light towers and attacked vendor trucks. Observers later blamed the rioting in large part on resentment of festival conditions, including overflowing toilets, lack of potable water and high-priced food. At Coachella, the promoters stressed fan comfort, which meant extra toilets, plenty of reasonably priced food and keeping the audience far below the capacity of the grounds to avoid overcrowding.

The key was that the Coachella fans didn't see the event as a target of a song like "Guerrilla Radio." Instead, they saw Coachella as something worth preserving: a haven of music, celebration and even social bonding. Thanks to both great performances such as Rage's and a warm, uplifting spirit, Coachella earned that all-essential element: fan trust. Indeed, the weekend represented a rebirth of the festival concept across the country.

Beck, 1999. This gifted singer-songwriter was another headliner at the opening Coachella festival, and, like Rage, he previewed songs from an upcoming album. In Beck's case, the music from "Midnite Vultures" was a bold step into a funk-driven R&B territory closer to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" period than Beck's earlier folk-shaded leanings. The slender auteur even wore a fringed flamboyant shirt and went through lots of Prince-inspired dance steps. It was a moment of sheer exhilaration for the 20,000 fans.

Beck also contributed to another special moment in 2004, one that again exemplified the informal spirit of Coachella. Just days before the show, Beck called Goldenvoice's Paul Tollett and asked if he could join the lineup, not on the main stage but in one of the smaller tents. He had been in the studio for months, and he wanted to "shake off some of the studio dust by playing before people." Beck was so relaxed he invited five fans on stage to play tambourine on a good-natured, folk-blues treatment of an old Kinks song. It was fun and disarming.

White Stripes, 2003. American rock 'n' roll was seriously in need of passionate new blood early in the new millennium, and the duo of singer-guitarist Jack White and drummer Meg White seemed the one most capable of supplying it. They offered a captivating blend of spectacular sonic textures, superb songwriting and daring instincts. As a fan, I loved that the Stripes had generated enough momentum to land one of the key evening spots on the main stage, but I worried about whether they were up to such a challenge. They had never played an L.A. venue larger than the 900-capacity El Rey, and they'd be facing some 30,000 fans at Coachella. No problem. The set was exhilarating, demonstrating that the Stripes could reach a wide audience without compromising their artful and deeply personal music.

Arcade Fire, 2005. Here's another case of a great band making a triumphant leap. This young, Montreal-based group was playing clubs in town just months before stepping onto one of Coachella's main stages. The songs about loss and resilience on their brilliant "Funeral" album took on added vitality on stage because the band performed with such zest.

Nine Inch Nails, 2005. Coachella has hosted many comebacks but none as thrilling as this one. In the early and mid-'90s, NIN leader Trent Reznor's songs of alienation and self-loathing hit the rock mainstream with an anger and aggression that had rarely been seen. For a while after his "The Downward Spiral" album in 1994, Reznor seemed the likely successor to Kurt Cobain as the voice of a rock generation. But he went through an emotional, drug-driven spiral of his own that left his next album, 1999's "The Fragile," so dark and impenetrable that it all but ended his career. Indeed, he didn't have another album until 2005's "With Teeth."

On stage at Coachella, Reznor was more compelling than ever. In one of the new songs, "The Line Begins to Blur," he shared the confusion of his addiction: "There are things I would never do / There are fears I cannot believe have come true." It was a courageous, life-affirming hour.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

ART

Michael Govan's bright ideas
There's lots of heat but little friction as the new director lights a fire under LACMA.
By Suzanne Muchnic
Times Staff Writer

May 13, 2007

FIFTEEN months ago, when news of Michael Govan's appointment as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rocked the art world, he described L.A. as "the future" — and its central art museum as "a sleeping giant." LACMA, he thought, had lots of possibilities and lots of unfulfilled potential.

The wake-up call came fast. On the job just more than a year, Govan has rejiggered an ambitious expansion and renovation project designed by architect Renzo Piano, recruited high-powered trustees and shaken up the exhibition program. He has envisioned a museum that views its history through Latin America and Asia, and its future through contemporary artists. But his perception of LACMA as a snoozing Goliath hasn't changed.

"It is a sleeping giant," he says. "It's this amazing place. It's got a great collection. It's done great things in the past. But we are the second city in culture, and where does our museum rank? Certainly not No. 2. You have to go down the list a bit."

How far?

"I'll let you do that."

Succeeding Andrea L. Rich, who concentrated on administrative affairs during her 10-year tenure, Govan couldn't have been expected to transform the museum in a year. A prominent figure in New York's elite contemporary art circles, he had risen from second in command at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to the top job at the Dia Art Foundation. At Dia, he led a privately funded cultural institution that collects contemporary art and supports large outdoor projects, and oversaw a $50-million campaign to convert an old Nabisco factory in Beacon, N.Y., into a vast exhibition space. In Los Angeles, he would take charge of the largest encyclopedic art museum in the Western states — a sprawling institution that embraces the entire history of art, maintains a 100,000-piece collection, serves many constituencies, supports itself with a mixture of public and private money and operates on about $44 million a year. Keeping the museum on track would be difficult; steering it onto a higher plane would be a major challenge, especially for a newcomer.

"One of the big things you have to do in Year One is to listen," says Govan, a trim, impeccably groomed 43-year-old who has highly developed social skills but no fear of expressing his opinion. "You need to get to know people and what their objectives are, develop working relationships," he says, sliding into a black leather chair in a colleague's office at the museum while his office undergoes some repairs. But he hasn't wasted time while getting acquainted.

In the first round of an effort to enlarge and strengthen the board of trustees, he has recruited writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton, singer and actress Barbra Streisand, journalist Willow Bay, investor Anthony N. Pritzker and technology entrepreneurs Terry Semel, David Bohnett and Chris DeWolfe, increasing the working membership to 44.

The first phase of Piano's expansion — a $156-million project including the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, funded by LACMA trustee Eli Broad and scheduled to open Feb. 9 — was underway before Govan arrived. But he has taken a hands-on approach, transforming the new entry pavilion to focus on art rather than visitor services and enlisting artists to enliven surrounding spaces. A bold proposal to mark the museum's entrance with Jeff Koons' "Train," a 70-foot replica of a 1943 locomotive dangling from a 160-foot crane, may not go anywhere. But plans for a garden of palm trees by Robert Irwin and an installation of vintage Los Angeles streetlights by Chris Burden are in the works.

Most renovations of existing buildings are scheduled for the second phase of LACMA's redo, intended to unify and update a jumble of mismatched structures. But under Govan's direction, the gallery for Greek and Roman art on the second floor of the Ahmanson Building already has undergone a startling change. A wall that covered large windows on Wilshire Boulevard has been removed, allowing marble sculptures to bask in natural light.

No deal is too done

THE museum's exhibition program is set years in advance, but Govan has put his stamp on that too. He and senior curator Stephanie Barron invited artist John Baldessari to install "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images," turning what might have been a conventional exhibition into a popular and critical hit. Baldessari effectively turned the galleries upside down by putting a Magritte-style carpet of blue sky and fluffy white clouds on the floor and a modular rendition of a freeway system on the ceiling.

And new exhibitions have been squeezed into the schedule. The largest, opening today, is "Dan Flavin: A Retrospective," a comprehensive traveling survey of the late Minimalist's career, including about 40 of his trademark fluorescent light works. Co-curated by Govan and Tiffany Bell, director of the artist's catalogue raisonné, the show was scheduled to end its tour in Munich, Germany, in March. Govan arranged to bring it to Los Angeles with a new feature — a reconstruction of lighted corridors made for the E.F. Hauserman Co. showroom formerly at L.A.'s Pacific Design Center.

Among other additions, last winter Barron and fellow curator Kevin Salatino quickly organized "Picasso's Greatest Print: The Minotauromachy in All Its States," the first U.S. presentation of the eight etchings. Curator Tim Wride whipped out "Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs From the Permanent Collection" to accompany a long-planned traveling show, "The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950," both of which run through June 3. "SoCal: Southern California Art of the 1960s and '70s From LACMA's Collection," organized by curator Carol S. Eliel, will appear in mid-August.

"The level of activity is intense here," says Nancy Thomas, deputy director. "Michael is planning for the long term, laying a deep and sustainable framework for future growth. That's surprising when we have a major building opening soon and galleries being moved around, but he thinks two steps ahead. I'd say 10 steps ahead."

Jeremy Strick, director of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, says Govan has brought "tremendous energy" to the museum — and the city. "Los Angeles has been seen as a great international art center increasingly over a number of years," Strick says. "I think his arrival at LACMA gave new momentum to that trend. Michael has had success in building LACMA's board and raising expectations for trusteeship. He has expressed determination that LACMA should rise to the standard of a great encyclopedic museum in a great international city. That has a positive impact throughout the community."

Govan is pleased with what's been accomplished, much of which he attributes to long-range plans developed over several years before he arrived. But he's disappointed that he hasn't made much progress with the permanent collection.

"We have had some stunning acquisitions. The Eakins painting was a fabulous addition," he says, referring to "Wrestlers," an 1899 work by American realist Thomas Eakins donated in December by Cecile C. Bartman and the Cecile and Fred Bartman Foundation. "But I have to say I am surprised that there is not more generosity. Look at what the community of Seattle just gave the museum," he says of nearly 1,000 artworks donated to the Seattle Art Museum in honor of its 75th anniversary. "I think they are valued at a billion dollars. The Whitney Museum in New York a few years ago announced a trustee effort to add several hundred million dollars' worth of new art. You would think in a city as wealthy and ambitious as Los Angeles there would be more direct generosity directed to the museums. The idea of building this place for future generations is not really up to the level of the city, at all.

"There are pockets," he says. "The Ahmanson family is a great example. They don't buy for themselves; they buy for the museum. The collection they have given the museum is worth well over a hundred million dollars. But what you notice in other cities is a thrill to go after the very best for the museum. It's not that we don't have a very good collection. It's not that we can't build a great museum. It's just surprising that you don't find more desire to really go after the best pieces and bring them to Los Angeles."

Straight-talker that he may be, Govan is not a complainer.

"Michael is the most optimistic person I have ever worked with," says LACMA President Melody Kanschat. "He really believes anything we set out to do can happen. His focus on the long term, on what something will be when it's complete, has been wonderful for the construction team. It's helped them to see that everybody is working to make something happen, and it will happen. It was very late to insert something like Bob Irwin's palm trees into the project, but because of Michael's optimism, I've got teams of people who should be saying 'No way' saying 'Oh, maybe.' "

True to form, Govan has a bright vision of LACMA's future.

"The big task," he says, "is to frame a narrative of culture and art that is compelling and specific to Los Angeles, but with international relevance. That is what I see as the ultimate objective. A point of view that can be crafted here, looking from where we look at the world. The public is going to see a lot of construction because we absolutely need the physical facilities. Our metropolis has over 10 million people. We need a physical facility that really lives up to that. But it's not just about building buildings. We need a worldview and a viewpoint."

Art in the hands of artists

LIVING artists will help to shape that view, says Govan, who has hosted public discussions with Koons, Irwin and video artist Diana Thater. The spirit of Baldessari's "Magritte" installation lives in the museum's boardroom and in Govan's office, floors of which are covered with some of the sky-like carpet used in the galleries. Koons and Burden have made personal appearances at board meetings, presenting their projects to the trustees.

"After Chris Burden talked, we had the rest of the meeting in the Magritte show," Govan says. "I want to make the board meetings engaging. These are volunteers from the community who are spending a good part of their lives, their time, their intelligence, their resources on this place, so I do want it to be an engaging process."

To those who fear that LACMA may be putting too much focus on contemporary art, Govan says: "All art is made by artists. The dynamic between the art and the artist is a fundamentally interesting territory of investigation. When I look at art history, I am always interested in the circumstances of the work being made. It's not just that it exists as a precious object. Art that's great is always new.

"Artists have an incredible talent to help you work through issues," he says. "In other times and other places, if you were going to build anything, if you were the pope or a politician or a private person, you would always engage artists in the process and the thinking. One of the things I'm trying to bring to this place is that involvement with artists. It's not a new idea. We are just revitalizing it."

Contemporary art will be on center stage in February when the Broad building opens with pieces from LACMA's holdings and the Broad Art Foundation's collection. That's "huge," Govan says, and he isn't talking about size.

"What happens is that the museum property gets consolidated, Ogden Drive disappears, parking goes underground and BCAM gives us something new and of very high quality. It clears the ground, primes the canvas by clarifying the site. Once that is functioning with that level of architecture, clarity and generosity of space for art, that sets the bar for what the museum campus should be overall. Once we have done that for contemporary art, our obligation is to do that for the whole history of art."

LACMA should not pattern itself after East Coast museums that base their worldview on European art history, he says. "We should be leaders. That's where having an edge on contemporary art is a big investment. I'd also like to privilege pre-Columbian art, art of the ancient Americas, as a frame for the past. These are natural ways to reframe art history from a Los Angeles viewpoint, and that is what we are obligated to do.

"The content of the museum should reflect the fact that our community is Wilshire Boulevard, the county of Los Angeles, the state of California, the Western United States. There is an outlook shared by the Western states. I don't mean red versus blue, but culturally coming from wide open space, coming from a relationship to Latin America and Asia. I think we have to broaden our horizons to reflect that. And, hopefully, generosity will also emerge."

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