Feeding Time at the Getty (January 1998) written for First Things
Michael Linton
The queue was 2,500 years long, stretching from the entrance to medieval manuscripts and across the plaza to antiquities. But since the restaurant was full, the al fresco cafe above the garden packed, if you wanted a cappuccino or a box lunch this was the only place to be. After forty-‐five minutes in line (and now three patrons from the front), we heard the vendor announce that his supply of box lunches was exhausted. He was sorry but there weren't any more. The irritation from the queue was almost palpable. When a lady in front of me started to bitterly question the vendor's competence and his ancestors' characters (and species), a man behind me yelled, "Hey lady, the poor guy's oud'a lunches, wha' da ya wanna do, eat him?" Only the unexpected arrival of a cart of fresh sandwiches sent-‐up from the kitchens restored the tranquility of the museum plaza, the sounds of trickling fountains again mixed with the contented munching of turkey croissants.
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It seems that it's the Getty's nature to arouse passions. The neighbors apparently hate it, and the L.A. city council is still passing ordinances trying to regulate the traffic to the center. Citing precedents as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright and Borromini, critics hail the complex as one of the triumphs of our age—with Herbert Muschanp's critique in the New York Times being perhaps the most eloquent (12/05/1997). Because it uses no public funds, political conservatives praise the Getty Center while liberals chide it for potentially fostering elitism. Kids love the trams, and while native Angelenos might not see the need for yet another box full of old stuff—hey, after all, we already have the County Art Museum, the Hollywood Wax Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits and all that art at Forest Lawn too—everybody agrees that the view is great. One thing is certain, with a physical plant costing well over a billion dollars and an endowment of nearly five times that, the J. Paul Getty Trust is the six hundred pound cultural gorilla that can't be ignored. And ignored it isn't. The public opening of the Trust's museums and administrative headquarters in December of 1997 was front page news around the world as journalists and critics made full use of the five-‐pound press packet provided by the Trust's unfailingly thoughtful public relations office. But for once, even the professional hypsters couldn't out-‐hype their subject. The Getty is splendid. Perched on a hilltop almost a thousand feet above the Pacific, the buildings of the Getty Trust very well may be the most beautifully designed museum complex in the world. It is certainly the most beautiful in America. But more importantly—and ironically—the Getty Center is the crowning achievement of our time and culture: the "American Century" has finally produced its acropolis. Architect Richard Meier's brief was not to just design a museum but to design a complex of public and private buildings housing the Trust's various branches: The Getty Information Institute, the Conservation Institute, the Education Institute for the Arts, the Grant Program, the Research Institute, and the Museum. To these were added offices for the Getty Trust itself, a restaurant, an auditorium, parking facilities and, of course, that tram. After rejection of several locations easily accessible in the LA basin, the Trust chose to build its center in the hills above Santa Monica. But the decision was immediately controversial. Although, by LA standards, somewhat isolated, the site was smack in the middle of some of Southern California's most expensive real estate. Lawyers for the Getty's deep-‐pocketed neighbors insisted on over one hundred building restrictions: no structure over 65 feet tall (so as not to obstruct the neighbors' view of the Pacific), no towers, no white walls, etc., etc. And So as not to tax the already infamously congested Sepulveda Boulevard, the parking garage was limited to 1,200 places, spots that had to be reserved by a five-‐dollar registration, paid in advance. And the tram that would carry visitors up from the garages to the complex had to be non-‐polluting and silent. In spite of the limitations (or perhaps because of them, remembering Stravinsky's quip that he felt most artistically free when he was well fenced), Meier's complex is a masterpiece. From the parking garage's entrance to the plaza that opens at the
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hill's crest, the Getty Center unfolds before the visitor with an almost eighteenth century pace and elegance. Meier's decision to clad his walls with blocks of rough-‐ cut travertine has received universal applause, and rightly so, for the stones give what might have been a sterile international-‐style fortress the rich vibrancy and warmth of a Provencal farmhouse. But the Getty is no collection of grim modern boxes. Meier juxtaposes sharp angles with looping curves and plays with the dissonance of stone, steel, and glass in a way that gives the complex a wry humor. The Getty is indeed grand but it is not grandiose. The feel of the place is one of light, breath, warmth, and easy charm. Even the steps are so graciously spaced that you hardly notice that you're climbing them.
To the south-‐east of the tram platform are the Trust's main offices, an auditorium, and the Information Institute which is the Getty's branch devoted to applying computer technology to research in the arts and humanities. What perhaps will be the Getty's most beneficial—and least public—activities, are housed directly behind the tram platform. Here, The Getty Education Institute for the Arts oversees projects aimed at improving art education in American schools. Next door, The Conservation Institute busies itself with high-‐tech preservation of art works and publishes the journal Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts. Through the Getty Grant Program, restoration and preservation projects are supported around the world. Since 1979, this program alone has awarded nearly $69 million to support 1,700 projects in 139 countries (recent projects have included preservation of Mayan murals in Chiapas, Mexico, Byzantine mosaics in Rome's Basilica of Santa
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Maria Maggiore, and a medieval fortress on the Silk Road in northern Pakistan). Across from the tram is a restaurant and The Getty Research Institute, a huge doughnut shaped library housing 700,000 items related to the arts and humanities. But the keystone of the complex, architecturally and spiritually, is the museum. On the edge of the mesa that juts over the LA basin to the south, Meier has arranged six pavilions and an entrance hall around a generous open court (the site of our lunch-‐ line). Paintings, arranged by periods, are displayed on the upper floors and lit by natural light (filtered by computer-‐driven louvers set in the sky lights). Sculptures, manuscripts, and decorative arts are displayed on the ground floors. The pavilions are connected by expansive glass enclosed galleries, open breezeways and broad balconies that look out over Los Angeles to Palos Verdes and beyond. Each gallery is supplied with an abundance of well-‐written descriptive brochures and there are four information centers staffed with well trained, and pleasant, docents. Bands of interactive computers are provided for the more curious and there is even a "family center" where, among other things, children can dress-‐up in costumes and "pose" for an eighteenth-‐century portrait. As I said, it's a splendid complex. But the character of the collections within those walls is a different matter. Certainly the Getty's assembly of Greek and Roman antiquities (which will be fully displayed only when the villa in Malibu re-‐opens in 2001) is particularly rich—even when it's many rumored forgeries and looted pieces are taken into consideration. The Getty's photography collection is perhaps the world's finest and the collection of illuminated manuscripts is exceeded in this country by very few institutions and perhaps is nowhere as beautifully displayed. But it is in its paintings that the Betty disappoints. Yes, there are some spectacular works: a Chardin 1760 still life, a small but exquisite Friedrich "Walk at Dusk" from 1835, Pontormo's 1537 "Halberdier" (which used to be at the Frick in New York), Valentine de Boulangne's "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery," Mantegna's "Adoration of the Magi," Jan van Huysum's 1722 "Vase of Flowers." And the polyptych by Bartolommeo Vivarini may be the most radiantly preserved (or restored) Renaissance painting in America. But that's about it. There's Ensor's much bally-‐hooded 1888 "Christ's Entry into Brussels," and the young Rembrandt's particularly silly 1632 "Rape of Europe" — these, plus a lot of dreary portraits of rich, smug people looking particularly rich and smug, make up most of the collection (rooms full of pictures like these remind me that fires are not always cultural disasters). There is nothing at the Getty to compare with the wall of Monet haystacks at the Chicago Art Institute, the English works at Yale or The Huntington Library, the Vemeers at the New York Metropolitan or the Diego Rivera courtyard at Detroit's Institute of Arts. Square foot for square foot, the tiny Tintern Gallery in San Diego probably can claim a better collection than The Getty. And while the painting collection disappoints, the collection of "decorative arts" repels. Fully half of the museum's floor space is devoted to beds, chairs, commodes, dressers, pots, paneling, tapestries, sconces, chandeliers and what not—eighteenth century high end brick-‐a-‐brack, examples of the worst taste money could, and can,
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buy (indeed, an enormous 1755 Parisian corner cupboard may be the most hideous piece of furniture I've ever seen). Fittingly enough, these galleries were not designed by Meier but by an interior decorator. In all of this, the qualities of the collection mirror those of the Institute's benefactor, John Paul Getty. By all accounts a thoroughly unpleasant character, Getty was a Minnesotan who made his money in Oklahoma oil and spent relatively precious little of it (when his grandson, John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in 1973, Getty paid only $2.2 million of the nearly three million ransom negotiated, which was the maximum amount he could deduct on his taxes; he loaned the remainder to his son at 4% interest, and this was only done after the kidnappers had sent Getty one of his grandson's ears). But he did buy art, when he thought it was cheap enough, and the stuff associated with the Caesars and the courts of Louis XIV and XV particularly appealed to him. Getty had little taste for American art or art of this century and did not collect it (in its decision not to acquire non-‐European or 20th Century works, apart from photography, The Center perpetuates Getty's tastes). When he died in 1976, he left behind the twin legacies of familial disasters and the Getty Trust, endowed as a colossal tax dodge. Which returns us to The Getty itself. What is so remarkable about The Center, after you've wandered around it, watched people in it, and sat a while in the central plaza thinking about it, isn't the corporate structure, the architecture, the travertine, or the tram. It's the fact that Meier hasn't designed a museum complex at all. From the parking garage to the balconies that look out over Los Angeles, The Getty is a "sacred precinct." It's a temple. The notion is from Marcea Eliade. In several works, but most notably in his 1957 The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade describes how a sacred space is constituted. Echoing the mythological center of the world and the site of theophany, the sacred precinct anchors the civilization in being. Because of its importance, the precinct's boundaries are marked, separating it from mundane regions. The precinct is walled off, like the temple of the Hebrews, or elevated, like a ziggurat, or remote, like Delphi. It's hard to get to, and a journey to it requires commitment and sacrifice, like Compostella. It's extravagant, built of costly materials shaped using the society's highest craftsmanship, like Borobudur. Furthermore, it is overseen by a priestly cast and includes a mechanism whereby initiates can be trained in the mysteries of the faith. The correspondences between The Getty Center and Eliade's sacred precinct are almost too obvious to require comment. Its hilltop isolation, the relatively difficulty of admission (you must make reservations well in advance), the sophistication of its
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Mircae Eliade (1907-‐1986)
design and engineering, the extravagance of its materials, its corresponding research and education institutes (it's "evangelical" arms), all exemplify Eliade's model. But commenting of the "sacred" nature of The Getty is hardly insightful. Most of the great museums in America are just the same. It was not accidental that the New York Metropolitan, the National Gallery in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum, the Boston Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the De Young in San Francisco (in its original building) and the Chicago Art Institute were all designed to be reminiscent of temples. Looking at great art—and in particular great paintings—was believed to be morally edifying as well as culturally uplifting. Such a potentially redemptive activity required an appropriately grave setting. So the classical facades, broad entrance steps, and interior grand staircases all were calculated to provide settings for the moral transformation looking at the art might bring. In this sense, there's nothing unusual about The Getty, it simply perpetuates a tradition in American museum design (The tradition in Europe is a bit different. Museums were built to look like palaces, beginning with real palaces, like the Louvre, but extending to art palaces, like Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum; the builders of the National Gallery in London even cannibalized parts of the Prince Regents' Carlteon House for their new picture gallery). And you could even say that
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the tram that takes us up the hill from the garage isn't that different from that 5th Avenue bus that delivers us to the Metropolitan. But there is something else at work here too. Eliade writes that the primary purpose of the sacred enclosure is to function as an opening toward the transcendent. The sacred precinct is where the temporal opens to the trans-‐temporal, "where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence." And so the shrine of Amon-‐Ra did not enclose the god, but was where the Egyptians came to glimpse that reality which shaped their civilization and gave it cohesion. And the gem-‐studded altar of Suger's St Dennis was not where the gothic French saw the Eucharist enshrined but rather where they glimpsed the eternal truths around which medieval Christendom orbited. The sacred precinct thus is not a sanctuary within which the holy is caged but is rather a gateway through which it is experienced. Like Stonehenge, the sacred precinct is holy not because the gods are caught in it, but because in it (and through it) we can see the gods (or at least, that's our guess about Stonehenge). Although Meier's pavilions at the Getty are repositories for precious objects, neither the objects themselves nor the pavilions that house them really command the bulk of our attention. Watch the people. You see that they are lingering not inside, but outside. This isn't the case in Cleveland, or Philadelphia, or Detroit, and it's not just those other places don't enjoy California's great weather. Standing in the museum's open court, what we are continually pulled to, and return to, are not Meier's galleries inside but rather his terraces, balconies, and loggias outside. Why? Because it is from there, those terraces, balconies, and loggias, that we see what the site sanctifies, what it hallows, and what it "unveils." What Meier's Getty draws us to is the view out over Los Angeles. The "holy" that the Getty reveals is Southern California. The trans-‐temporal that the Getty "anchors in being" is the land of the endless freeway, the no-‐fault divorce, the hyper-‐individual whose past is inconsequential and whose future is irrelevant. The site sanctifies us. Or better, the site sanctifies Me. And what a Me we admire. Hollywood is the first thing to command our view, with its myth-‐making mills, myths hallowing that primordial Yelp, that triumphant song of Me. Rising behind Hollywood are the towers of central Los Angeles, the two cities linked by Wilshire Boulevard where John Wayne, in cowboy costume on rearing horse, waves to the world in bronze (a memorial to a man who spent his life being paid to play pretend). Long Beach and its port is south with its hundreds of acres of cargo containers: Asian goods imported to fulfill American hopes of happiness, American goods exported to satisfy the world's desire for fantasy. South
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too is Palos Verdes and Portuguese Bend where palaces are built on cliffs that the builders know will be eventually claimed by the Pacific (but perhaps they think that time and tide will wait for them). UCLA and USC are below us too; typical American campuses where trustees measure value of learning by endowments and patents and grants and students justify their studies by dreams of cash. There's Venice Beach and Marina Del Rey and West Hollywood: straight/gay/bi/trans/questioning gyms and juice bars and life coaches—oh to be beautiful and screw forever. And finally the thundering surf of Santa Monica and Malibu, the site of Shirley McClain's epiphany, where she splashed and exclaimed, "I am a god, I am a god, I am a god!" This is the holy of holies which Meier's Getty opens to us, the transcendent to which we are continually pulled by his architecture and it is within this transcendent that the whole complex is suddenly made understandable. It's appropriate that The Getty doesn't have a "great painting" here, drawing us to it, like the Turner "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" in Cleveland, or the Raphael "Madonna with St. Anne" in Washington, or the Bellini's "St Francis" at the Frick. Such a piece would complete for attention with the center's purpose; its inclusion would introduce another "god." Even the amount of space devoted to brick-‐a-‐brack is under-‐ standable for what else are Boulle coffers and Sevres pots and Meissen tureens but a kind of personal adornment, stationary jewelry to decorate its possessor? There is no new painting in these galleries because by its very definition new art challenges, assaults, and calls into question and one does not challenge a god. The Getty had to be on a hill and on this hill because not only did it have to be removed from the city,
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isolated as a sacred spot, but only from here could the whole city be revealed and, being revealed, hallowed. It even had to be founded on a fortune made in oil and made accessible only by car and situated next to a freeway for oil is the blood of the narcissistic economy, and the car the vehicle that frees us from each other and the freeway the hammer that shatters community. And it had to be here, in this city, a city literally built on oil fields and vivified by cars and knit by freeways, because Los Angeles is the greatest city of the American Century. It is the dream of the world. And the American Century? The world's dream? What is this? It is Me. What I get. What I discard. What I value. What I disdain. I am my own alpha and omega. I have no heritage (so I discard my parents). I have no posterity (so I abort my children). Truth is what I proclaim now (so I can tell no lies). My laws are lawful as long as they please me (so I commit no crimes). I have no other gods before Me (so I can not be idolatrous). I swear by Myself (so I can not break a vow). I am that I am. This is the American of the narcissist. It is the America of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, Madonna and Michael Jackson, Ted Turner, John Spong, Sylvester Stallone and Norman Mailer. It's the America of Justice Kennedy's spectacular 1992 "the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. . . " This is the America that stands before the threshold of a new millennium as the world's only colossus. No city better represents this America Triumphant than the sprawl that is Los Angeles. And no spot in Los Angeles betters hallows that colossus than The Getty. It is in this way that the Getty stands as the crowning achievement of our time and culture, the acropolis that marks our golden age. Coming to the Getty today and standing on one of its balconies is indeed like marching in the Panathenaic procession, passing through the Propylaea and, with hushed tones, entering the sacred precinct. But instead of looking up at Phidias' huge gold and ivory idol of the goddess as an ancient Athenian would have (which, no matter how contrived, was still an image of some divine other), here we find ourselves looking down, back into the city, back to us. We will have made this pilgrimage to admire ourselves, to pay homage to us, to worship that which we have created, to adore I Myself. It is as if one acropolis marks the birth of Western Civilization and another, on the globe's far side—where the New World tumbles into the Pacific—marks its implosion. Which returns me to that lunch cart in the Getty's plaza and that near riot. As the new century approaches there is growing talk of the world’s end, of rumored financial collapse, of mass death by plague, of mysterious portents in the heavens pointing to a time of divine accounting. Perhaps. But perhaps too the end will not so much be heralded by the thunder of earthquake, the roar of flames and the blare of heavenly trumpets. Perhaps it will be announced simply, and quietly, by the irenic munching of gods having lunch.
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