Broad Wins in Los Angeles

That seems to have ended pretty much the way everyone thought it would.  The great story here, though, is the way that artists, curators, and the public seemed to work together throughout December in a united front.  The group included Andrea Fraser, Katie Grinnan, Martin Kersels, Alexis Smith, Jennifer Steinkamp, and James Welling, among others. Two comments:

Eli Broad in Los Angeles on Tuesday:

“Today is a great day — it’s really the rebirth of MOCA. We’ve known for years that MOCA loves L.A., but today we know that L.A. loves MOCA as well.”

Cindy Bernard in response:

“It’s like President Bush at 5 p.m. on a Friday making major announcements,” Ms. Bernard said. “It undercuts our ability to have a real discussion, and it underscores MOCA’s lack of transparency.”

[Top Ten of 2008] #10 - The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

While Eli Broad celebrated the contents of his storage crates at LACMA (85% of which came from Gagosian, by Christopher Knight’s count), Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s collection of clever, idiosyncratic conceptual, video and light works slipped into the Hirshhorn collection.  On Kawara Date Paintings, their boxes, and newspapers, sat down the hall from Doug Wheeler’s effervescent Eindhoven (1969), seminal Nauman videos and a handful of videos by the underrated Douglas Huebler.  The real game changer, though, was a perfect Irwin trinity: a glass column, a disc work, and a dot painting.

00-99=No1-2K-20K (1969-1970) by Hanne Darboven

[Detail of] Untitled (1970-1971) by Robert Irwin


October 24, 1971 (1971) by On Kawara


A Rubber Ball Thrown on the Sea, Cat. No. 146 (1970) by Lawrence Weiner

Larry Gagosian

From Christopher Knight's review of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

Of 176 works on three floors, 139 are by artists who have shown with the same gallery -- Gagosian, commonly considered today's leading commercial powerhouse. That's nearly 80%. BCAM turns out to be GCAM. Such a narrow vision feels insecure, more investment deal than adventure.

Quality journalism. It'd be interested to see a breakdown of other collections based on institutional / commercial representation over the years. What percentage have been affiliated with Castelli or the Dia Foundation, and so forth?