LA = Pittsburgh?

In case you missed it, in yesterday's NYT Michael Kimmelman wrote a long essay on the Getty Trust, and then summed up his piece with this:

In The Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, the paper's art critic, has lately suggested that the Getty think more globally by acting locally, starting with a town hall meeting for people to vent and dream.

So here's what I might ask. Why doesn't the Getty think big?

Next time get the Rubens. Pay whatever it takes, and competitors might not bother to compete in the future. Broaden the collection. Los Angeles doesn't have Byzantine art to speak of. It also doesn't have a place with enough room and firepower to import landmark exhibitions like the Met's Byzantine extravaganzas. The Getty could provide both.

And why not broker an all-out merger with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which while using the Getty's deeper pockets would provide a perch downtown, not on a fancy Westside hilltop? MoCA's [sic] collection, exhibitions and expertise would instantly add luster and zip to the Getty and move it decisively into the 20th and 21st centuries of art.

Kimmelman is right about the Getty and acquisitions, but after that...

If Kimmelman thinks Knight hasn't been thinking big, he hasn't been reading him very carefully. Ten days ago Knight re-wrote the Getty's entire grant program and envisioned the Getty Trust building another museum. (The last one the Getty renovated cost $275 million, so museum-building ain't exactly a small idea.) And Knight has consistently taken on the big-picture questions around the Getty.

And what about the idea of merging MOCA into the Getty? Aside from the mere impracticality and the overwhelming unlikeliness of the idea, what about that makes any sense at all? Does Kimmelman visit Los Angeles as infrequently as he does Pittsburgh? Does he just not pay much attention to institutions west of the Hudson?

MOCA is the best-programmed contemporary art museum in America. (In the last couple years MOCA has originated or co-originated the Rauschenberg combines show, Masters of American Comics, Visual Music, the Robert Smithson retrospective, A Minimal Future?, Ecstasy, and more. No other American contemporary art museum has a record anywhere close to that.) MOCA has a strong, growing permanent collection. (True: It needs a place to show it.) No museum in America does as much with a $16.6 million annual budget.

So why does Kimmelman think that MOCA should be subsumed into the management disaster that is the Getty Trust, an institution with no contemporary art expertise, and with no trustees that either know or care about contemporary art? Simply because MOCA would give the Getty 'zip?!?!'

Worse: The idea diminishes MOCA, a museum that deserves a heckuva lot more respect than being the butt end of a half-tossed-off merger idea. It's exactly the kind of suggestion you'd expect from a provincial art critic who doesn't pay much heed to what's going on outside his island.