The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was founded in 1961 to show the world that Los Angeles deserved to be taken seriously. Like New York, Chicago, Boston, and so many other American cities, it, too, could have a large, comprehensive, important art museum that would give tourists someplace to go that wasn’t Disneyland or a Hollywood movie studio.
Over the years, LACMA has grown to be the largest art museum in the western United States and has a serious and wide-ranging collection, but it has always seemed caught between its desire to transcend its city’s identity and its desire to embrace it. And that is a big part of the problem with its new building, the David Geffen Galleries, which opens next month.
