Interesting revelations concerning energy giant BP and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were made in a March 6th, 2007, article by the Los Angeles Times. The paper revealed that sometime in 2006 the chairman and president of BP America, Bob Malone, asked billionaire Eli Broad – who is heavily financing LACMA’s reconstruction – to recommend causes in…
UPDATED Jan. 18, 2017: The last available record of Michael Govan’s annual compensation as director of LACMA was made available in 2014; his pay was listed as $1,029,921. LACMA also provides Govan with a free $5-million dollar home; the New York Times noted that benefit is worth “$126,500 a year, according to tax fillings.” Mr. Govan’s salary is now considerably…
Eli Broad is ranked by FORBES as number 42 on its list of 400 richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of over $5.8 billion dollars. Touted as a philanthropist interested in raising the cultural profile of Los Angeles, Mr. Broad, whose name rhymes with “load,” has been busy putting his stamp on L.A. He was the founding chairman of…
RATTLE is an important national literary publication that offers contemporary poetry, translations, reviews, essays and interviews. I’m pleased to announce that my painting, The Red Dress, appears as the cover for the journal’s Spring 2007 issue. RATTLE publishes print issues twice a year, but also releases web based versions as PDF downloads during the months of March and September. The…
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), after receiving $25 million dollars from the multinational oil company BP (British Petroleum), plans to dedicate a new entry gate and pavilion to the energy Goliath. To be christened the “BP Grand Entrance”, it is nothing more than an edifice to big oil and the clearest example yet of the increasing corporatization…
A certain strain of contemporary art has examined, or taken inspiration from, the aesthetics and pulp visions of the American comic book – of course the Pop art movement and influential artists like Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg come to mind. Comics have also influenced American cinema, a trend I’m not terribly fond of, and the latest comic book to hit the…
As an aficionado of modernist aesthetics and goals, my heart took flight when I read that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was offering an important new exhibit on modernism, The Modern West. LACMA claims The Modern West offers “a fresh and innovative look at modernism through a very personal lens,” however, in the museum’s publicity, the use of…
I know that public memorials to a nation’s war dead are usually erected after a conflict, but lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time for American artists to begin seriously contemplating what an Iraq War Memorial might look like. As of this writing, 3,154 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq. Years ago I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial…
