Now LACMA is really rudderless

That's essentially the hollow situation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where push finally came to shove over the weekend. A power struggle between trustees and museum staff over a planned expansion of the Wilshire Boulevard facility resulted in the abrupt "retirement" of the museum's director.

Normally in this kind of dust-up, the art professionals deserve our first consideration. They, not the trustees, shoulder the arduous day-to-day responsibility of working on the public's behalf in the cause of art. Even if they're not so good at it, the enormous difficulty of the task needs acknowledging. An art museum director must satisfy the wildly differing demands of a diverse public, a trained professional staff and a gaggle of competitive trustees who are often self-made entrepreneurs, each used to having things his own way.

But not this time. This time all one can do is stare and blink.

That's because 10 years ago LACMA's board decided to dispense with the routine idea that an actual art museum professional should run the county art museum. Instead they hired a university official with zero knowledge, skill or experience in the field to direct LACMA's professional staff.

In effect the board chose to replicate itself in the director's office. The setup meant that no one in a position of museum authority was being guided by professional conscience.

Major institutions in New York, Chicago and elsewhere had already experimented with similar schemes by the 1970s, as American art museums grew larger and more complex; all abandoned them as failures. But LACMA's board sailed straight into the inevitable storm, hoisting as its standard the creaky mythology of L.A. as innovative and unique.

Now that proven bad idea has come a cropper. And in a brawl between opportunists, neither side deserves our sympathy or support.

Here's how push came to shove by Sunday.

On March 14, employees at LACMA were asked to remove their ID badges and fill the hundred or so chairs set out for a news conference announcing the late-fall launch of a major but long-struggling building expansion. The dais was dotted with luminaries -- local billionaire Eli Broad, Italian architect Renzo Piano, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, LACMA Director Andrea L. Rich and others. A phalanx of television cameras was on hand, and for the sake of appearances on the 6 o'clock news it had to look like big public enthusiasm was greeting the momentous announcement. LACMA staff was the museum-equivalent of the paid seat-fillers at the Academy Awards -- the folks who rush in to keep the place looking packed while the powerful movers and shakers come and go.