Michael Govan, CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who has taken a lot of heat for his rescue plan that others (including me) have criticized as an inappropriate takeover bid, called me yesterday to explain his side of things.
In a wide-ranging interview, he emphasized that MOCA had approached him for a proposal, not the other way around. He added that he had known full well that offering a rescue plan would cause him to be “heaped with criticism for a takeover mentality” but he was “happy to take some hits if if MOCA comes out of this well.”
An institution like LACMA, he asserted, could not have fallen into the financial hole that MOCA is now struggling to emerge from, because “our fiscal controls are way too tight. Here it’s brutal. We run a tight ship, so that would never happen in a place like this.”
I’ll have more from our discussion later. From today’s news coverage, it appears that the fate of MOCA’s director, Jeremy Strick, and of the dueling rescue plans presented by Govan and Eli Broad are still in the balance.
UPDATE: Read more from my interview with Michael Govan here.