More on Eli Broad from Martin Filler (and me)

Broad-ly Speaking at LACMA

More Eli Broad criticism occurs in Martin Filler's brilliantly titled piece for the latest New York Review of Books (Mar. 20), Broad-Minded Museum. (Why didn't my editors think of that?) A key passage:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art receives substantial public funds and many of its staff members are civil service employees of Los Angeles County. Thus the parties who acceded to Broad's de facto privatization of a big chunk of LACMA--the cultural equivalent of a leveraged buyout, or taking a public company private--have done a grave disservice to the taxpayers of the county, who, whether they like it or not, will be footing the bill for much of Broad's monument to himself.

Broad's insistence on naming LACMA's new contemporary art facility for himself while withholding gifts from his collection, his initial reluctance (eventually reversed) to allow other donors' names on individual galleries, and the presence of large plaques (above) with color photos of him and his wife at the top-floor and ground-floor entrances of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum are in stark contrast to the situation at London's Tate Modern, involving its own recently announced major contemporary art benefaction. The galleries containing these gifts are not to be called the Anthony d'Offay Rooms. They are "Artists Rooms."

I do believe that major patrons should be allowed naming opportunities if they want them. But that's it. No further self-aggrandizement, as occurs in the above-pictured plaque extolling Eli's business success and endorsing his "lending library" paradigm for big private collections. Here's the last sentence from this memorial:

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum will ensure that the Broads' vision of making great works of art accessible to a broad [pun intended?] public is institutionalized in one of the country's leading encyclopedic museums.

My hope is that Broad's new "vision"---holding works privately in perpetuity and doling them out in temporary, rotating loans to museums---is institutionalized nowhere else.