Caitlin Flanagan: How to Wreck a Museum

Seven hundred million dollars’ worth of critical theory has landed on a mid-city block of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and it’s a pity, because the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi used to be there.

At first glance—if such a behemoth can be taken in with something as mere and pitiably human as a glance—the recently opened David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art suggest a link to one of the great periods of the city’s history. From the 1950s through the early 1970s it seemed like America could do anything, and Southern California was the place to do it. It had the biggest aerospace industry in the world, and an architecture of the fantastic to go with it—glass walls, sweeping angles, everything on the up, up, up. The new Geffen Galleries, hanging 30 feet in the air, look like a spaceship. It does not answer to the laws of nature: It pulses across LACMA’s huge campus, and when it gets to the hard stop of Wilshire Boulevard, it soars right over it.

Get a bit closer and you realize this isn’t Tomorrowland—or at least it’s not our Tomorrowland. In the renderings, the building was the clean white of an Apollo mission, and it looked beautiful and exciting, like Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal in what became JFK Airport. In reality, it’s Soviet gray, all of it raw concrete. Did I miss a meeting? I sent my sister a picture of me inside the gallery, dwarfed by the elevators (I really just wanted to show her my pants), and she texted back: “Where are you? Leningrad?”