Balancing Art, Minds, Money

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT

Dec. 31, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES ART CRITIC

When Ann Philbin arrived in Los Angeles last January, she took the reins of a young art museum with a troubled past and huge promise. Westwood’s Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, which had its rocky debut in 1990, was a tiresome $100-million monument to its founder’s overweening ego. Five years after opening, with Hammer dead and the museum adrift, a merger was brokered with neighboring UCLA.

Veteran museum director Henry Hopkins helped stabilize the newly anointed UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, but Philbin’s arrival as director began the new era in earnest. One of a small but growing number of women to join the male-dominated ranks of museum directors, Philbin, 47, had transformed the Drawing Center in SoHo from a quiet nonprofit gallery into one of the most adventuresome, highly respected art organizations in Manhattan.

Philbin’s tenure coincides with a critical period for American art museums, which are experiencing unprecedented public popularity and mounting pressures to both educate and entertain diverse audiences--all while keeping the bottom line firmly in mind. In her inaugural year she has spent much of her time and energy sizing up the best potential fit between the university museum and the sprawling, internationally prominent art scene in L.A.

Question: Museums face a number of daunting issues today. Which are most important to you?

Answer: The audience issue is the primary one. Making decisions in terms of who leads the way: the audience or the museum professionals.

Q: How do you reconcile the conflict?

A: I’ve always organized my program around what I think artists want to see, which locates it somewhere in between a general audience and a professional audience. My friends are artists, I listen to them, I know what interests them. If you make shows you know artists want to see, I believe the public ultimately will follow and be interested in it. It assures a certain freshness.

Q: What other pressures do museums face now?

A: The issues that we saw around the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum are also important. It’s irrelevant to me whether one considered the art good or bad. The censorship issues surrounding that controversy are critical ones. By virtue of the fact that we are a university museum we are protected, because 1st Amendment issues are of the utmost importance.

I’m looking forward to the Assn. of Art Museum Directors meeting in Phoenix in January, because it’s practically being billed as an “emergency session” [in the wake of “Sensation”] to discuss those funding issues, those behind-the-scenes arrangements that are made with collectors and exhibition sponsors. A lot of things have gotten a little bit loose for a lot of us, especially around issues of commerce. There’s no cut-and-dried process that can be employed, but it’s necessary to build a very strong skeleton of ethical and moral values and then trust that museum professionals will behave accordingly.

Q: Are fiscal pressures driving this process?

A: Money issues are gigantic for us. There also has to be an education process back to the public about what kinds of financial pressures museums face today.

Q: Is it too much to say that there’s currently a crisis within the art museum field?

A: It was certainly a crisis for the Brooklyn Museum, but is it a crisis for everyone else? Maybe not yet. I wouldn’t call it a crisis, but it’s certainly on everyone’s mind.

Q: What distinguishes a university art museum like the Hammer from other kinds of art museums?

A: Students. We have to see our job as primarily educational. The student body is a primary audience, and that’s very different from how most museums see the hierarchy of their audience.

There’s a luxury inherent for the curator in a university structure just because it is about education. We can present exhibitions that by no stretch of the imagination could be considered blockbusters or audience pleasers. It gives us the ability to show more esoteric or as yet unproven material.

We’re also going to be focusing on adult education programs. I have a sense that in L.A. there is a hunger for that kind of thing. The programs that surrounded the “Sunshine & Noir” exhibition [in 1998] were jammed, you couldn’t get into them. There were hundreds and hundreds of people turned away, who basically came to hear people who live here talk about art here. That to me is really interesting and exciting.

Q: The Hammer Museum opened in 1990, but the $60-million building was never finished. Do you have plans for the building?

A: We’re going to do a major renovation. We’ve hired Michael Maltzan as architect, and Bruce Mau, who’s based in Toronto, will design our graphic identity. Together they’re going to give us some presence in the neighborhood. The idea is that it will be a gift to the community as a much-needed urban center.

We’re going to open up the entrance in the back, on Lindbrook Avenue, and close in a lot of the outside walkways and perhaps even the courtyard. Right now we have only 25% gallery space, which is very low. We hope to double that.

We’ll move the bookstore to the courtyard and have a restaurant. The courtyard and the lobby will be public spaces, so you won’t have to pay admission until you get to the third floor. We’re going to finish the 300-seat auditorium,which has been sitting unbuilt for almost 10 years, and it will become the new home for the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s program four nights a week, with museum programming the other three nights. We’ll build classrooms too.

It’s a two-year project, about $20 million, half of which we need to raise.

Q: L.A. has a reputation for limited arts philanthropy. Do you expect the fund-raising to be difficult?

A: Personally I feel a big difference between philanthropic traditions in Los Angeles and those in New York--which is my reference point, since I spent 20 years there. Philanthropy’s not as deeply rooted here [in the arts].

If you want to have a very rich cultural presence you have to support it with dollars and time. That’s not completely grasped here on a really deep level. Philanthropy can range from a $500 check to a $5-million check, but finally it’s about the participation of the community in its own cultural life. That’s going to be a challenge for me.

Q: You’ve been in L.A. about a year; from that vantage point, how would you characterize the art scene here?

A: L.A. is an international art town at this point, so in terms of the art that’s being made, it’s as pluralistic as anywhere.

The concentration of artists in this city is one reason I came here. You can really feel it in the art scene. In New York you really feel the presence of the dealers. Not that there aren’t scores of artists, but the dealers in New York have a strong presence in determining the flavor of that art scene. Here you feel it still belongs to the artists.

I was in Chicago recently and the head of the school at the Art Institute told me that an unbelievable percentage of his students now make a beeline for Los Angeles upon graduation, as opposed to New York. Which is a very big shift. It means a lot for this city and for this country.

Q: What needs to be done to accommodate that shift?

A: It means the institutions are going to have to get up to speed, the collectors, the philanthropists.

No city can have a major cultural impact unless the art is being made in it, rather than just being processed and presented in it. It’s an economic thing, really. It’s about real estate. Young artists can’t afford to move to New York anymore. Of course New York is exciting, but you can’t be a young artist and move to New York anymore. But you can move to Los Angeles.

In New York 25 years ago, two dozen institutions were founded to accommodate the thriving emerging artists scene--including the one I came from, the Drawing Center. That’s how I see the Hammer Museum functioning. Here, the dealers have always had the responsibility for showing emerging artists, and that’s not always good for artists or the dealers. I’ve hired an artist--James Elaine--to be curator for the new project galleries and that comes from an artist-run alternative space tradition.

Q: If you could wave your magic wand and change one thing about L.A.’s art scene, what would it be?

A: [long pause] I’m fighting saying “philanthropy,” because I don’t want to be a broken record about it.

Q: Maybe that’s necessary.

A: I wish that the primary force of money and influence in this town--which is the entertainment industry--understood the richness and importance of the visual culture that exists here outside its own world. The rest of the world knows more about it than L.A. does, in a certain way. I would love an awareness of how important L.A.’s art scene is to the larger world to be known in its own town.

Q: Speaking of the larger world, globalization is the buzzword of the moment. What does it mean for L.A.’s art scene?

A: It’s very significant. L.A. is key to how it will play out. New York is a little bit closed right now. You sense that it’s been stretched to its limit and needs to figure out how to live with itself. But Los Angeles feels like it’s mutating and accommodating what’s happening in the world--figuring itself out as it’s going along.

Mutability is an important aspect of it. This town is built for that. New York feels a bit more like Paris--perfect, for the 20th century.

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CROSSROADS

This is the conclusion of a series of interviews, conducted by Calendar critics, with leaders in the arts and entertainment.

Dec. 26

* MUSIC: Tod Machover, MIT media lab and new music composer

Dec. 27

* TELEVISION: Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

* MOVIES: John Lasseter, creative guru at Pixar Animation Studios

Dec. 28

* THEATER: Cherry Jones, Tony-winning actress

* FOOD: Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley