CALLS FOR ACTION OVER MOCA CRISIS
Two pieces for the Los Angeles Times discuss recent developments—or lacks thereof—regarding the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s collapsing endowment. As the Times’s Christopher Knight writes: “Ten days have passed since news broke of a financial crisis that threatens the very existence of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the nation’s premier institution focused on the art of our time. And a week has passed since philanthropist Eli Broad published an Opinion article in the Times that offered $30 million to begin to help shore up and eventually stabilize MoCA’s endowment. His reasonable condition: Some of that challenge must be met by others. So far, MOCA’s board of trustees has remained virtually silent on Broad’s bold proposition.” Knight writes with concern about a paralysis that may allow “a drift toward the path of least resistance: an absorption of MoCA into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board writes about Broad’s history of philanthropy in the city: “Los Angeles has been in this predicament before, and it was Broad who was largely responsible for getting us out of it. After years of inaction amid the city’s troubled economy, what now stands as Disney Hall was, in the early 1990s, a parking garage with no building on top, a symbol of a city that could not right itself. Then-Mayor Richard Riordan appointed Broad to take over fundraising for the project, and Broad succeeded where so many others had failed.” The Times concludes with a call for greater civic responsibility: “This is a decisive moment in Los Angeles’ cultural history, and grateful though we are for Broad’s offer, it should not fall to him alone to rescue MoCA. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa should take a page from Riordan’s book and appoint a fundraising committee for the museum, ideally with Broad at its head. Its mission should first and foremost be to find donors to match Broad’s offer; its larger undertaking should be to prove, as Broad and company did a decade ago, that this city can protect its most vital institutions not just in a booming economy but in a troubled one as well.”
In his own response, Tyler Green writes on Modern Art Notes that “it’s time for the trustees who don’t want to save MoCA to get out of the way (read: resign) so that those who value MoCA can try to save it. And those trustees who want to save the place ought to be more public in their support. The current stasis is doing no good.”
