A curator's take on a smaller 'expanded' LACMA

2019-06-17T15:51:00-04:00

[...] it’s worth considering one of the issues that drove so much of the criticism: the ideal—said to be lost in the soon-to-be-transformed institution—of the museum as an “encyclopaedia” of collections, one necessitating a particular form of architecture permanently exhibiting its collection in chronologically sequenced galleries organised by medium and culture.

Michael Conforti, former director of the Clark Art Institute and previously a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and also at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, writes in defense of LACMA's controversial plan of a considerably smaller 'expansion,' designed by Peter Zumthor, citing curatorial shifts in recent decades.

Image: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The Boundary

"The early 21st-century art museum, civic and social space that it also is, is designed for a public expecting an equal experience with art, architecture and amenities, a public with little consciousness of the square footage applied to any one of these," explains Conforti's opinion piece in The Art Newspaper. "Los Angeles is now committed to building such a museum, doing so as it plans other sites for curatorial activity, ones responsive to its special urban condition. This seems appropriate [...]."

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A curator's take on a smaller 'expanded' LACMA