Questioning LACMA's judgment: Cheech Marin & Vanity Fair

The first paragraph of introductory wall text at LACMA's Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection is unexpectedly revealing. It explains, in strikingly direct terms, why this exhibition is at one of America's major art museums. [Photo]

The paragraph explains that the collector's celebrity is the basis for this exhibit. The wall text has nothing to do with the art on view. For the artists whose work is in the show, it's an insult of the worst kind: 'You're only here because of your association with a Hollywood star,' it says. The exhibition is an embarrassment.

And the presentation gets worse: At the entrance to the exhibition two paintings are hung in opposition: Both are 'expressionist Thiebauds' by Carlos Almaraz. One is Sunset Crash (1982) from Marin's collection. The other is Crash in Phthalo Green (1984) from LACMA's collection. The message of the installation is that the private collection is installed here as legitimately as are works in the museum's collection.

The baldfaced equivalency is inappropriate. It insults the LACMA curators and trustees who have worked to build LACMA's collections. It says that all their scholarship and collective wisdom is worth no more than this one guy's credit card, that Visa can get an art collection installed at the museum just as readily as can the LACMA staff's professional judgment.

To wit: The Cheech Marin show stomped all over LACMA's excellent Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement. I can't imagine that "Phantom Sightings" curators Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon Noriega were thrilled that their own museum was one-upping them. (Perhaps that's why Fox kept his name off of Cheech's show, a withholding first noted by Christopher Knight.)

'Cheech at LACMA' demonstrates that LACMA director Michael Govan is still growing into his job. No question the museum, which had suffered under poor leadership for years, has been recovering: LACMA seems to be making amends with long disaffected collectors,  recent acquisitions have been impressive, and many of LACMA's galleries look better than they have in years. Chris Burden's Urban Light is both smart and endearingly populist. Those are all important developments for which Govan deserves lots of credit.

But two of LACMA's recent exhibition decisions are confounding. It's not just the Cheech Marin debacle: Next month LACMA will open a show called Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008. The museum describes the show as "the first major exhibition to bring together the magazine's historic archive of rare vintage prints with its contemporary photographs." The museum's press release -- which is little more than promotional boilerplate of the sort that would appear in a Vanity Fair media kit -- says that the exhibition was "conceived" by VF editor Graydon Carter and that it was co-curated by VF's "editor of creative development." (The show opened at London's National Portrait Gallery and will travel to other portrait galleries. LACMA is the only encyclopedic art museum on the tour.)

The show is unaccompanied by scholarship, or anything else that would indicate that it belongs at LACMA. (Above: Vanity Fair has produced a book "[b]y Graydon Carter and the Editors of Vanity Fair; [w]ith an essay by [Vanity Fair columnist] Christopher Hitchens.") Like the Cheech show, it's pure celebrity grab-ass with a side of advertising.

Govan has spoken frequently of making LACMA an encyclopedic museum with contemporary art at its core. Instead, his museum looks like an encyclopedic museum motivated by brushes with celebrity.

Related: Christopher Knight agrees on the fluffing of Marin and exposes the museum's decision-making rabbit hole.