All around the globe, financial traders, corporate executives, and consumers are
holding back, keeping their wallets closed and sitting on their hands. No one — as recent economic statistics depressingly show — is doing much buying. So it comes as rather a shock to find out, as The Art Newspaper just revealed, that Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is rushing in where others fear to tread. Govan has commissioned Jeff Koons to make a titanic life-size replica of a locomotive suspended from a crane for LACMA’s collection. Price tag: $25 million. The Art Newspaper called it the most expensive commission ever by a museum, and said LACMA has already spent about $1.7 million of the $2 million so far pledged for the piece. I have to wonder about Govan’s sanity.
True, Koons began developing the piece (below, © Jeff Koons) about two years ago, before the subprime crisis
started the world on a downward spiral that has yet to find its bottom. But Govan himself noted last fall, in a New York Times article, that people would be putting things on hold until the economic picture brightened. What about him?
LACMA has had to refinance some debt and has frozen some hiring, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the Koons — it’s going ahead.
I am all for acquisitions — I wish many museums that spent big on building expansions over the past decade had used more of that money to buy art. But let’s put Govan’s commission in perspective: in fiscal year 2007, LACMA spent $36.6 million on ALL of its acquisitions. In 2008, its spent $41.3 million buying art. So is a new Jeff Koons work — the museum owns just one piece, according to its online catalogue, but has three big pieces on loan and on view in its BCAM building — the place to spend such a large sum now? The last time I visited LACMA, late one afternoon last fall, I was one of four visitors in the entire BCAM building. Unless LACMA has figured out something no one else has, its endowment has no doubt plummeted in value, and the latest numbers on charitable giving for the arts are not encouraging.
LACMA’s press office said Govan sees Train as a campanile, like a building, rather than a traditional work of art. It’s a long-term project that doesn’t have an actual cost yet — though I can’t imagine that $25 million estimate dropping — and he is “optimistic” about the economic climate when, in about 18 months, the actual decision will be made. Well, good luck on that.
But if I were on the LACMA board, I’d be asking Govan some tough questions. Wouldn’t you?