Regular readers of greg.org know it, but I'll say it upfront: I'm Team MoMA. I've supported the museum for years--I feel like I grew up in it, art-wise. And film-wise. Right now, MoMA's film department and programming are stronger than I can ever remember. It feels absolutely vital, critical. And even when the old timers SHHH! people for breathing too loud in the theater, it's great to see a movie there.
And yet the Bing theater at LACMA is even nicer. And yet, LACMA is suspending [i.e., killing] its film program. In Los Angeles. It's just mindboggling. They have to be planning a complete, and somehow different reboot, a makeover of some kind for which Michael Govan's only plausible path is going cold turkey.
Two home team analogies: MoMA's Projects series, which lived for a very long time just off the lobby as a small gallery for anointing emerging artists, but which was eventually brought back to the Taniguchi building as a roving showcase for [basically] New York debuts by global artists. Generally speaking, it seems to be working.
The other is more directly film-related: the Modern caught a lot of flak for closing its film stills collection, squeezing out the longtime curator and librarian--who happened to be active in the employee's union, and the whole thing went down around the time of the staff strike--and shipping the whole thing off to the film center in Pennsylvania. It was a controversial action, to say the least, but [film] life goes on. What the net impact is, nearly a decade later?
So yeah, I'm alarmed by Govan's decision and by Kenneth Turan's outrage over it. But I also have to hope that some kind of substantial film program will return, even if it's new and different and takes a while. Because I can't imagine otherwise.
LACMA slaps film in the face [latimes]
