Commentary : Who Should Run an Art Museum?

The trustees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art want you to know that they believe it takes no special knowledge of art to run an art museum.

None. Zero. Zip.

They are alone among boards at major art museums in the United States in believing this, but believe it they do. As proof, LACMA’s board announced Wednesday that former UCLA vice chancellor and communications studies professor Andrea L. Rich would replace the departing Graham W.J. Beal to become the sixth director of the Wilshire Boulevard art museum.

The new director follows predecessors who each claimed advanced degrees in art history, as well as extensive curatorial experience in the museum field. Rich has neither. A back-door revolution has thus been completed, as a nonprofessional board has now replicated itself at the staff level.

The appointment finalizes an overhaul begun four years ago. Then, Rich was hired as president and chief executive, and the director’s job was downgraded to secondary status. Large museums in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Chicago had tried variations on this corporate business model before, but all eventually rejected it as inappropriate.

LACMA stoutly disagrees. Of course, they don’t have much choice. Four years ago, the board had to come up with some explanation for its eyebrow-raising decision to hire an administrative chief executive. The nearly two-year search for someone to succeed director Michael Shapiro, whose tenure lasted just 11 months, had been unsuccessful. No respected figure in the art museum field outside L.A. wanted the job.

Why not? Well, who wanted to pack up house and home to come work for an unruly board that had made such a muddle?

In 1992, Shapiro had been plucked from relative obscurity for a position for which he clearly wasn’t ready--and at one of the most difficult times in the museum’s history. Southern California was deep into a stubborn recession, county budgets were being cut and the museum was trimming staff positions, programs and public hours. The challenge was enormous for a seasoned administrator, never mind a green one. Shapiro’s brief tenure was a fiasco.

The museum world, like any professional sphere, is small. Word travels fast. And the word was that LACMA’s board had erred in its selection of a new director, didn’t stand behind him when the going got tough and, finally, cut its losses and forced him out.

Not a very attractive context for a position that still needed to be filled.

Thus was born the dubious “we need two jobs, not one” strategy, which this week was quietly shelved. It was obvious from the start that, for the long term, the two-job scheme was bound to fail. Beal, who is leaving after less than three years as second-in-command behind Rich, didn’t stay long in a field in which a successful director’s run at a major museum is typically a decade or more.

To the surprise of no one, Rich herself has proved to be a sensitive and savvy administrator as president of LACMA, much as she was in her previous jobs at UCLA. But just as university heads are typically culled from faculty, so art museum heads are best chosen from the ranks of art professionals. There’s no mystery as to why. The university’s mandate is academic knowledge, and academics have it; the museum’s is artistic knowledge, and art professionals have it.

A vacuum in artistic leadership at the top inevitably shows, because a nonprofessional chief executive lacks the first-hand knowledge essential to informed advocacy. When the new director explains, as she has to The Times, that the administrative overhaul underway at LACMA will give her “more time to focus on the art part” of the museum, I wince. There is no “art part” at LACMA--or at any other art museum. Everything that’s done--from sweeping the floors to balancing the budget, acquiring art to stocking the gift shop--is done at the service of the artistic mission. It’s all “the art part.”

Or should be. More than mere semantics, it’s a professional mind set. A corporate business model, where “the art part” gets a slot on an administrative flow chart, can’t accommodate it. But gifted art museum directors work from that stable core, which functions as a steady internal gyroscope for every decision they make, large or small. Without it, the museum starts to wobble.

LACMA’s exhibition program in the last few years shows how. Rich has spoken of needing to balance narrow scholarly shows with others that are more popular. Four publicity-minded shows obviously scheduled for their mass appeal have indeed appeared during her tenure: “Picasso: Masterworks From the Museum of Modern Art,” “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” “Diego Rivera” and the current “Around Impressionism.” Whatever the artistic content of these popular exhibitions--and it has been mixed at best--not one has added an ounce of scholarship to the field.

The problem lies in Rich’s basic conception, which divides art exhibitions into those that are scholarly and those that are popular. Art museum professionals know this to be a false dichotomy. An art museum’s obligation is not to entertain a complacent public with what it thinks it already knows, then subsidize scholarship with the gate receipts; it’s to develop artistic scholarship on the public’s behalf, then find ways to engage us with it.

Among the more brilliant shows ever mounted at LACMA was 1984’s hugely popular “A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape.” This stunning exhibition presented a thoroughly convincing reinterpretation of some of the most widely admired paintings ever made, synthesizing years of adventurous scholarship. It was a blockbuster with brains.

Also, it was an exhibition organized by LACMA. The shows a museum decides to organize itself, rather than the ones it rents from elsewhere, are critical to defining its essential character. During Rich’s tenure as chief executive, LACMA has presented four such shows that have largely excelled: “Eleanor Antin” (1999), “Yayoi Kusama” (1998), “Exiles and Emigres” (1997) and “Lari Pittman” (1996). That all are in the field of 20th century art, and that three of the four are retrospectives of living artists says something about the scholarly commitments of L.A.’s only encyclopedic museum--something disappointing.

LACMA’s mandate covers thousands of years of global art history, but apparently it’s becoming a de facto museum of Modern art. The perception is enhanced by LACMA’s announcement Wednesday that a curator of contemporary Latin American art will also be added to the staff. Including the two curators of photography, that brings to seven the number of LACMA curators solely charged with the art of our time. (For comparison, the curatorial staff at downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art numbers five.) Modern art is good, but LACMA is the largest encyclopedic art museum in the West. We look to it to generate significant exhibitions that reflect that range.

Is this development part of a considered artistic plan? Or is it drift?

Rich can’t be expected to evaluate LACMA’s artistic program, regardless of her formidable administrative skills. Art is not her field. Nor can she assess with any credibility the artistic success or failure of the museum’s curatorial team, even though she’s its boss. Yet any smart manager finally knows that if the person at the top can’t knowledgeably defend the integrity of the institution’s professional standards, it suffers a serious weakness.

Understandably putting the best face on a bad situation, LACMA can’t escape a fundamental truism: An OK museum is one thing, but great art museums are built by great art museum directors. There is no other way. To say so might seem obvious, but apparently it still needs saying.