Old-guard star power -- but little coherence

Eighties art is as diverse as Susan Rothenberg's reintroduction of representational imagery into gestural abstraction, Jean-Michel Basquiat's graffiti-fueled canvases and Sherman's self-portrait photographs pitting individual identity against media-driven cliche. Jeff Koons' life-size souvenir portrait of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee, is rendered in gilt-edged white porcelain, making for a colossal cultural knickknack worthy of the decadent Sun King, Louis XIV.

Last comes the post-movement era of the last 15 years, when art's rising cost seems to guide so much activity. Damien Hirst is one bloated example. The only artist in the show who is not American, he is also the only new artist whose work the Broads have added in depth.

Hirst was a cornerstone of the Young British Artists, who exploded onto the recession-tossed international art scene in 1992, fueled by collector Charles Saatchi's smartly wielded checkbook. Like Schnabel, he is notoriously overrated. Nothing has quite matched Hirst's infamous 1991 sculpture made from an actual shark embalmed in a tank of formaldehyde, which made his reputation.

Among the Broads' recent buys is a similarly pickled lamb, bought at auction in 2006 for $3.38 million. But none of the nine Hirst works is especially compelling. The newest -- a commissioned triptych imitating a Gothic stained-glass window made from thousands of butterfly wings, like a Martha Stewart craft project on steroids -- is frankly embarrassing.

For the statistically minded, three of the 28 selected artists are women, and six are Angelenos. (They were chosen from the Broads' roughly 2,000 works by more than 140 artists.) Seen in multicultural Los Angeles, the general ethnic whiteness is blinding.

That failing has not been helped in additional works that LACMA commissioned or bought for the site, including sculptures and wall-works by Baldessari, Chris Burden, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Barbara Kruger and James Turrell. (Not all these works are yet completed or installed.) Still, another statistic is the one that startles most.

Of 176 works on three floors, 139 are by artists who have shown with the same gallery -- Gagosian, commonly considered today's leading commercial powerhouse. That's nearly 80%. BCAM turns out to be GCAM. Such a narrow vision feels insecure, more investment deal than adventure.