A Soaring Arts Scene in Los Angeles Confronts a Changing Landscape

June 24, 2021 6:38 PM

The pandemic was economically ruinous for many cultural organizations. The Los Angeles Philharmonic slashed its annual budget from $152 million to $77 million. Museums lost millions in revenues. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills had to lay off 30 people. “It will probably take us 12 months to three years to get back to the same level of operation,” said Rachel Fine, the executive director of the Wallis. In addition to the challenge of philanthropy, the sheer difficulty of getting around this city — one sure sign that the recovery is at hand is that traffic has returned to roads and freeways — has long made it harder for theaters, music halls and galleries looking to draw crowds. The transit system is in the midst of a dramatic expansion, funded by a $120 billion mass transit plan. But it will be many years before it is completed. “It’s a wonderful place to live and it’s a wonderful place to work,” said Deborah Borda, who was the president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years before becoming president of the New York Philharmonic. “And it’s truly a receptive place for the arts. But if you want be there for a 7:30 concert, you really have to leave at 6. I knew people who used to come but stopped: That would be a reason that they would give.”
posted by folklore724 (13 comments total)

American colleges and universities laid off, fired, and otherwise axed 650,000 people last year.
It would have been even worse had CARES money not gone through.
posted by doctornemo at 6:44 PM on June 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

When I visited LA for a week a couple of years ago, I was really amazed at the breadth and depth of the art available in the area. Museums, so much different music, theater, street performers, street art...

The problem was, as mentioned above, you really can't get from anywhere to anywhere else in the greater LA area easily. Mr hippybear was working and living in Marina Del Rey (paying exorbitant rent to get to walk to work), and you could SEE downtown LA from his balcony window on a good air day. It wasn't that far away, distance wise. It was over an hour to get there from his place under the best of circumstances during daytime hours. Really amazing. I saw a lot of Venice and Santa Monica, mostly because the Blue Line was a single bus that ran straight up the road that connects those cities along the beach.

Wanted to do so much while I was there, didn't have the ambition to do the travel to get to much of it at all.
posted by hippybear at 6:55 PM on June 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

I would say your experience would now be worse, hippybear. Along with the traffic, homeless is now very in your face. My last train ride had high people or homeless people sleeping. My last bus ride had homeless people at the transit points. There are tents in a lot of areas where there were none before. This just adds more friction to the tourist experience.
posted by Monday at 7:01 PM on June 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've lived more than half my life in Los Angeles. Pretending it's a city is a bit silly. It's suburbs all the way down. Even downtown.

One might hope this will teach us that incentivizing rich donors to give money to the wealthiest and most boring art institutions isn't a productive way to fund art. Half of $150M is a lot to spend on yet another performance of Brahms, given the extremely talented experimental composers in LA who can't pay their rent. Both are good and should exist. But, the disparity is striking.
posted by eotvos at 7:07 PM on June 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

The New York Times talking about Los Angeles? Maybe look at the local paper:

Who will fill Eli Broad's philanthropic shoes? How about nobody?

The New York Times’ story, written by Adam Nagourney, implies that fundraising in celebrity-obsessed Tinseltown can be an exercise in frustration. “For all its wealth,” he writes, “Los Angeles has always been a challenging fund-raising environment.”

It’s an echo of a piece about Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Times that Nagourney co-authored with Tim Arango in 2018. “For all its successes,” they wrote, “Los Angeles has not developed the political, cultural and philanthropic institutions that have proved critical in other American cities.”

They also fret over Broad’s impending retirement.

Neither story mentions the Getty Foundation, a local institution that is not only endowed to the teeth but has supported innovative cultural initiatives over more than a decade, such as the Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions, as well as various pandemic recovery efforts.
.....
In fact, a moneyed philanthropist can wreak havoc on public institutions. Like the time, in 2008, when, after financing the construction of the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the tune of $50 million, Broad announced, weeks before the museum’s opening, that he wouldn’t be giving LACMA his collection.

Two years later, LACMA alleged that Broad had left the museum holding the bag on $5.5 million in additional construction costs — something a spokesperson for Broad denied. He also left the museum with additional maintenance expenses, since he didn’t endow the building. As the late LACMA director Andrea Rich told the New Yorker in 2010: Broad once told her that no one is remembered for funding endowments. In 2015, he opened his own museum, the Broad downtown.

Given this history, and given all the discussions about equity in culture that have taken place over the past year, it’s a weird time for the New York Times to be pondering who should fill the role of L.A.'s next Daddy Warbucks.

posted by mogget at 7:18 PM on June 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

Half of $150M is a lot to spend on yet another performance of Brahms, given the extremely talented experimental composers in LA who can't pay their rent.

What are you getting on about here?

The Phil under Dudamel has been aggressive about performing new music, and particularly new music composed by women and POC. They just announced the new season and they're going to be performing new or recent pieces by Jessie Montgonmery, Kaija Saariaho, Julia Adolphe, Pamela Z, Angélica Negrón.... And yes, Emmanuel Ax will be performing Brahms. But honestly, I think the Phil is one of the most "modern" orchestras in the world. It's a treasure.
posted by mr_roboto at 7:47 PM on June 24, 2021 [18 favorites]

I feel like the assumption built into Borda's statement is that she can only imagine an audience that comes from wealthy predominantly white westside neighborhoods, hence the drive time to Disney Hall in downtown LA. That is quite a limitation of audience. It's also a very NYT assumption to make about the city.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 8:47 PM on June 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Past.... "More inside"
posted by efalk at 8:55 PM on June 24, 2021

Struggling to understand the choice of excerpt, which seems to directly contradict the title of the post?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:00 PM on June 24, 2021

I feel like the assumption built into Borda's statement is that she can only imagine an audience that comes from wealthy predominantly white westside neighborhoods, hence the drive time to Disney Hall in downtown LA.

Yeah, this is a great point. It's like she's thinking about an LA 20 years ago. People live in Downtown now, and Silverlake/Las Feliz/Highland Park/Eagle Rock is all upper middle class. Also Pasadena, which always went to the symphony. The city West of La Cienega could fall into the ocean and the Phil would still sell out.
posted by mr_roboto at 9:16 PM on June 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

you wanna talk about covid-related LA cultural ruination, forget the Phil and the death of eli broad. how about my beloved bootleg theater, the blue whale jazz club, the satellite, the hi hat... not to mention countless even smaller local joints with live music, that languished in endless lockdowns that lasted over a year total, longer than anywhere else in the nation, with no better health outcomes than average. our mayor is now bailing town to be ambassador to a foreign country rather than stay and face his epic bungling of the pandemic, not to mention the 50,000+ homeless people in the county in tent cities all across the region, and sharply rising violent crime.

in my 22 years here, this is not the best of times.
posted by wibari at 11:11 PM on June 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

He also left the museum with additional maintenance expenses, since he didn’t endow the building.

No, the museum’s executives and board left the museum with additional maintenance expenses by approving a new building without securing the maintenance budget through other donors (such as themselves) or increased revenues.
posted by Ranucci at 8:57 AM on June 25, 2021

I sincerely miss the Blue Whale. A great loss. There are a lot of musicians and artists out of work for 2 years or changing careers right now in LA. Don't worry as much about the organizations with the endowments, only the people who are trying to make a living in the arts who can't.
posted by Red Desk at 2:44 AM on June 27, 2021