BCAM's People, Places and Art: An Irreverent Photo Essay, Part II

This continues my photo essay on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Part I is here.)

Why is this man talking to a lobster?

Left to right: Architect Renzo Piano, collector/patron Eli Broad, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, LACMA director Michael Govan, at opening remarks for BCAM's press preview

Ah, now I get it:

LACMA's podium adornment mimicked Koons' "Quad Elvis" (above), a gift of Jane and Marc Nathanson, who also gave $10 million for naming rights to the gallery where their painting appeared.

If you're really smitten by the lobster fetish, you can buy some at LACMA's gift shop:

Were these shipped fresh for the BCAM opening? Nope. Turns out they're just leftovers from the recent Dalí show. (You know, that crustacean-ed telephone.)

Here's Broad, on the left, amidst a surfeit of Koonses (with Warhol in the background):

Koons, like Hirst, seemed somehow diminished by the overblown display of his work. Not so, Kelly, Twombly, Sherman and Basquiat, whose total impact seemed even greater than the sum of the parts, thanks to the resonating energy of their oeuvre.

But for me, the knockout room was the disturbing convergence of five powerful Leon Golubs (three shown below), in part because it subverted expectations:

And this was the knockout artwork. No photograph (especially not mine) can do justice to the bravura beauty (especially at night) of this commissioned piece that lures you into BCAM's entrance plaza:

Chris Burden's "Urban Light," 202 restored cast iron antique street lamps

Less successful were two other commissioned outdoor works---"BCAM Born" banners by John Baldessari, addressed to the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. They struck me as billboards pretending to be art, rather than the other way around:

The palm trees are part of a commissioned work-in-progress by Robert Irwin, who discovered he was a landscape artist when he was commissioned to create the 10-year-old Getty Trust garden.

Here is Tony Smith's much discussed 24-foot-high walk-through sculpture, "Smoke," seen from the top of the old Ahmanson building's new grand stairway:

It's an endearingly unruly squatter, occupying nearly the entire cavernous lobby (renovated by Piano), where it mischievously mitigates the space's slick, corporate feel.

When you get to the top of those stairs, you are also rewarded by this piece, by the museum world's latest must-have artist (scroll to bottom of the linked post):

El Anatsui, "Fading Scroll," 2007
It was recently purchased by Eli Broad, as he told me during our conversation, but it was labeled, "anonymous loan"---probably the only evidence of Broad self-effacingness that I encountered during my visit. (He wasn't aware that it had already been put on display.)

I'll be interspersing additional Los Angeles posts, including more from my interview with Broad, during the next week or so.