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| Ed Ruscha |
For over a century, one phase of the art scene in Los Angeles has been a tendency toward visionary gigantism. (Breathtaking Cinemascope, Tori Spelling's house, Forest Lawn, Gov. Schwarzenegger...) Build it big, and they will come. The Broad is certainly big, a colossal honeycomb hangar on (fittingly) Grand Avenue, next door to Disney Concert Hall. Since the landmark building by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro opened in 2015, Angelenos and tourists have certainly been coming.
In March, at the height of the storms, I took a rainy-day outing with Larry Freedman to finally visit the Broad. Local billionaire Eli Broad and his wife Edythe built it so they -- er, Los Angeles -- could have a space big enough to show off the Broads' big art.
There is much to see at the Broad. Really, much. Art by the yard...
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| Ed Anatsui recycled old tin cans into immense chain-mail-fabric wall hangings, like this life-size opera curtain. |
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"Strips of Earth's Skin," 1944
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| Furniture so big, it's art! |
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| Big Koons for the Broads...art! |
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| Little Koons in Larry's hotel room...kitsch! |
Visionary gigantism is obviously about scale - Gigantic - but it is also about egotism - the Vision! Consider, if you can stand it, Koons's golden porcelain "Michael Jackson and Bubbles." It's a rumination on deluded folly. Jackson's folly? Koons's folly? Eli Broad's folly? Or yours, sucker?
Koons's follies of scale needn't be larger-than-life to express the theme of visionary gigantism. For instance, the choo-choo is miniaturized, but the work is still so long, that to display it properly requires an entire room. Recalling that their fortune derives from real estate, is the only key visitors need to unlock the mysteries of visionary gigantism and "get" the Broads' art.
One of the clever tricks of the museum is a glass wall that looks down into a huge storage basement below the building. You can't see the images; all you glimpse are the edges of canvases thirty, forty, fifty feet long or tall, loaded vertically in industrial-size racks, presumably waiting their turn to make it up into the galleries. You ain't seen nothin' yet!
Another whimsy which takes up an entire room seems simplicity itself, in everything except scale. It's an immersive cyclorama by Lara Walker, made of a series of silhouettes, of rural vignettes making fun of (?)/deconstructing (?) black life in the Old South. The content is engaging enough, but might it not be even more engaging in eight-by-ten paper prints hanging on somebody's powder-room wall?
For Broad visitors, the logic circle of visionary gigantism inevitably closes. We take away that the Broads had to make billions selling McMansions in order to buy the biggest, most expensive art of their time, in order to build a big expensive museum, in order to show off that they spent their billions buying big expensive art. The Broad is big because it is expensive and expensive because it is big. If the collection is priceless, is it because nobody else could buy art so big that it needs its own real estate? In fact, would the artists have made art like this at all, and priced it so high, if Broad weren't there to buy it? Visionary gigantism is its own content, and its own reward.
For Broad visitors, the logic circle of visionary gigantism inevitably closes. We take away that the Broads had to make billions selling McMansions in order to buy the biggest, most expensive art of their time, in order to build a big expensive museum, in order to show off that they spent their billions buying big expensive art. The Broad is big because it is expensive and expensive because it is big. If the collection is priceless, is it because nobody else could buy art so big that it needs its own real estate? In fact, would the artists have made art like this at all, and priced it so high, if Broad weren't there to buy it? Visionary gigantism is its own content, and its own reward. 
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