The Getty Gets Contemporary

The J. Paul Getty Museum has always struggled against the fact that, aside from photography, it does not collect contemporary art. So now, as discussed at yesterday’s NYC press lunch, it has inaugurated “a new program of exhibitions focused on contemporary art and its relevance to the museum’s collection and mission.”
First up is Tim Hawkinson, Mar. 6-Sept. 9. Whether his work is in dire need of additional West Coast exposure, having been the subject of a major survey just a year ago at the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art (after opening at the Whitney Museum, New York), is open to debate. Hawkinson’s “relevance to the [Getty’s] collection and mission” also remains to be seen.
The artist has been commissioned by the Getty to create four interrelated works, and the bladders of his grand-scale Rube Goldberg contraption, “Überorgan,” will flatulate in the Getty’s main entrance hall. (My unabridged dictionary says there’s no such word, so I had to invent it.)
The museum’s last big contemporary fling was “The Passions” in 2003—a 13-work show (including one Getty commission) devoted to video artist Bill Viola. A departure from the Getty’s usual territory, “The Passions” indulged the passion for that artist of the show’s curator, Getty director emeritus John Walsh. That show was tenuously connected to the museum’s focus on old masters, through the inspiration that Viola drew from a 15th-century fresco in creating his Getty-commissioned piece, “Emergence.”
Maybe instead of having to justify its forays into the present with the strained argument that they “make explicit the links between historical and current artistic practice,” the Getty should just say it wants to be contemporary and get on with it.
Then it would have to hire someone with much needed expertise in that field. Only a lack of curatorial enterprise and imagination can explain why, for its upcoming show, From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden (Oct. 5-Apr. 29), 12 of the 13 Richters, all from 2005, are gifts or promised gifts from two private collections to the Museum of Modern Art.
Nothing new was announced on the Getty governance front, although the museum’s director, Michael Brand, did say that, on his flight to New York, he edited a draft of new policy guidelines for museum acquisitions, to be released soon. And he still hopes to get some much needed art expertise on the Getty Trust’s board.
I also checked back with the California Attorney General’s office: The AG still anticipates releasing a report of the investigation into alleged Getty governance transgressions later this month.