LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum?

The LA County Museum of Art has always been a museum on its own terms. Housed in what felt like a ramshackle architectural hodgepodge of period buildings built around an outdoor plaza, its fascinating collections belied the setting. Instead of the stone palaces with imposing grand entrances housing the treasures of its East Coast and European museum counterparts, LACMA felt messy, disjointed… comfy. That very much suited the personalities of the city it’s in, a sprawling megalopolis that resists being reduced to any single label.

With the opening of architect Peter Zumthor’s new $724 million David Geffen building, a 110,000-square-foot concrete arc curving across Wilshire Boulevard and replacing the old hodgepodge, LACMA has made a bold statement not just with a building, but about what it believes is the museum’s role in contemporary culture. It’s the culmination of 20 years of self-examination and argument, not just about architecture, but more foundational, what it means to be a museum now.

Reaction has been sharp. The building has been called a triumph, a bunker, a curvaceous concrete sandwich, a cringey sculpture, and an experience that is “rule-bending, alive, disorienting, ambitious.” Love it or hate it, this is a museum I suspect, that will provoke many more debates than it will ever answer. All of these reactions are correct in their own way. What interest me, though, are the arguments the building makes about what a museum is for. And, just as important, what that argument costs.

The notion of a museum has evolved over the modern era. There have been three big roles. The first was as repository: Enlightenment taxonomies, encyclopedic collections, and proof that a civilization could catalogue itself. The second was teacher: the 20th-century civic canon, wall labels, period rooms, the museum as night school for a literate public. The third is one the Geffen building is betting everything on: experience and encounter—museum as a place where you have discovery.

The cultural historian Andras Szanto has been exploring this arc for a while now through three books examining the evolving relationships between culture and the museums they create. He suggests that each version of museum answers a different cultural moment. The new Geffen galleries look to be the most committed answer to the third question that anyone has built at this scale.

In a way, this is fitting. LACMA has always been a museum in search of itself. A middle-aged institution in a city without a center, it has rebuilt and rebranded itself roughly once a decade. The decision under director Michael Govan to demolish four Pereira buildings and hand the site to a Swiss architect known mostly for chapels in Alpine pastures is audacious in a way probably only Los Angeles could be. (Imagine a Boston or New York attempting it)

The Zumthor you get at Geffen is not the European Zumthor. His European projects Therme Vals and the Bruder Klaus field chapel are vertical, contemplative, intimate, buildings where the material does most of the talking because there is little else. The Geffen, on the other hand, is horizontal, urban, secular, and spread out across a boulevard suspended over traffic. It is Zumthor’s most public and least monastic work. What does this say about what LACMA wanted? The building is to be the argument.

Because inside, the art follows none of the usual anchors. No Medieval or Impressionist galleries or any traditional intellectual organization to help guide you through. The context for the art, if there is one, is that art is a conversation across time of cultures and ideas and objects, organized around a metaphor of oceanic swirls.

But is it the right argument to be making in this moment? In a world drowning in calorie-less AI slop, in relentless context-free scrolls on screens we all seem mesmerized by, context is emerging as a thing of enormous value. It is what the algorithm cannot reproduce. It is what museums have historically been better at than anyone else — provenance, chronology, influence, argument, dissent, the chain of “this painter saw that painter and decided to break with her.” For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters who came after?

The Geffen galleries walk away from this on purpose. There is no chronology. There are no departments defending their turf. All 15 curatorial departments can display anywhere, and none of them own the walls. The organizing principle, as Govan and the curators have pitched it, is four bodies of water — Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic — with 78 thematic sections operating as “oceanic flow.” Turkish calligraphy next to Reni. A 1963 Studebaker Avanti next to a Carlos Almaraz crash painting. Winslow Homer and Betye Saar in a room about transatlantic slavery.

Reading those pairings, you can see the ambition. Walking through them, you can also see the price.

The physical building is, in its own terms, remarkable. The concrete does something I did not expect: it recedes. It exerts a pure physical presence — the seismic engineering lets the whole thing sway five feet in an earthquake — and then it shuts up and lets the art be whatever it is. It does not fuss. It does not frame. It does not editorialize. The art looks gorgeous against the concrete, and because it’s been given room to breathe, it invites you to contemplate it on its own terms.

The glass envelope surrounding the concrete boxes is a portal to Los Angeles. You look up from a drawing and there are palm trees and traffic lights. It collapses the distance museums usually cultivate and makes the building continuous with its city.

But the natural light is both protagonist and problem. Reflections on glass. Glare on paint. Mark Lamster at the Dallas Morning News called out the “serious glare and silhouetting problems,” and he is not wrong. On the other hand, I can imagine visiting at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and having two completely different experiences. So is this a feature or a bug? I’m not entirely sure.

The other problem with the light is the contrast between “outside” galleries and “inside.” The building is a continuous curve, with the changing light from the outside pouring in (there are simi-transparent drapes to protect the art). Arranged in the interior are 27 concrete “boxes” which are smaller galleries. These are oddly unpleasant spaces by contrast with the flowing larger “outside” galleries. They replace traditional “wings” at most museums and allow for a concentration on one idea or another. But they are dimly lit so your eyes have to adapt from the larger daylight spaces. And—I realize this is a bit unkind—they seem like cramped prisons for the art. This may be because outside the boxes you encounter the art on your journey through the building. Inside the boxes, you’re interrupted, enclosed.

As you walk through the broad spaces, there is a series of tables in the middle of the rooms, with objects just sitting there, as if they’d been laid out in a jewelers shop. This is both strangely unsettling but also incredibly intimate. You approach the object the way you would approach something on a sideboard in a collector’s living room. No vitrine, no stanchion. You worry, briefly, for it. You get over it — the things are firmly anchored — and you are closer to them than traditional museum convention.

But here I get to the real cost of this approach. Art is a vocabulary. It is a language of subversions and celebrations, revivals and rejections, arguments and counterarguments running across centuries. How do you know a work is audacious if you don’t know what it’s being audacious against? How do you know a painting is a rebellion without a tradition behind it? Or that this or that innovation made everything after it (which to modern eyes looks commonplace) a different conversation?

Strip away chronology and movement, and the audacious and the derivative look identical. So do the profound and the decorative. A Reni becomes a pretty thing. A Turkish calligraphy becomes a pretty thing. The Bacon becomes an especially intense pretty thing. The work doesn’t stop being art, but the museum abdicates helping you read it.

Art without context is ornament, but is it what we want museums to do? I’m reminded of San Francisco’s Ice Cream Museum. No real meaning. But it sure was fun.

Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, places art in its galleries not by art movement or style, but around ideas. So you’ll encounter art side-by-side from different eras and cultures but in a way intended to create a conversation. Look at this inspiring Western landscape. But right next to it something that draws your attention to a less-told less-glamorous story of the West. The juxtaposition of the art is unexpected (as here at Geffen), but Crystal Bridges is all about the context, messying up the narrative, challenging what you may have taken for granted. I wonder if LACMA has these ambitions, and if so, how it might happen.

So I have to admit to a complicated set of reactions. Because the other thing the Geffen galleries do is let you look at physical objects as physical objects. Not as data points in a wall-label narrative. Not as exemplars of a movement. Just as things made by people. The concrete frames without imposing. The light is generous. The absence of vitrines is incredibly cool.

This is actually an old idea. The white cube gallery was modernism’s insistence that art speak for itself. But it was invented for audiences who already spoke the vocabulary. It assumed the context was already in the viewer’s head. Geffen revives this for audiences who may not carry that context. Whether that is a brilliant adaptation, a beautiful concession, or just plain incoherence, is the open question of the building.