Old-guard star power -- but little coherence

As an exhibition, it's incoherent -- a counterfeit permanent collection that is actually a temporary loan, on view for a year. The only prominent link between Leon Golub's flayed Expressionist paintings of chilling Third World torturers, Roy Lichtenstein's cheeky high-style cartoons and Ellsworth Kelly's shaped abstractions made from pure color is that the Broads bought them all. The collectors' taste is the show's subject, not the art. The misdirection of visitor attention is a primary reason that major museums, such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, maintain a commendable policy of not showing private collections.

The exception is when the collection, or a significant portion of it, is already pledged as a gift. LACMA organized a similar Broad show in 2001, hoping to get a donation. Two years later, the collectors instead pledged a new building ($56 million) and modest purchase funds ($10 million, mostly spent on Serra's fine, room-filling steel sculpture, "Band"). Eli Broad told The Times he wouldn't be paying for a new building if he didn't intend to donate a portion of his collection. But last month he decided his private collection would instead be given to his foundation, and no art would be given to LACMA.

There is profound irony in this discouraging about-face. Before World War II, virtually no market existed for contemporary American art and most museums were apathetic. Today, market sanction can be nearly instantaneous. The big cultural narrative of the last quarter-century has been the rapid institutionalization of new art. More than anything, BCAM tells the transformation's story.

The show's three distinctive focal moments -- the Pop '60s, the Neo-Ex '80s and today -- represent art's three most robust market spikes, each larger than the last (and the first two followed by collapse). In LACMA's new entry pavilion, Koons' massive bouquet of colorful, reflective stainless steel, "Tulips" (1995-2004), acknowledges that commercial history.

A typical floral greeting, the savvy work is also an industrial-strength evocation of the art market's birth in 17th century Holland. The mirrored flowers recall the human vanity symbolized in Dutch still-life painting and the disastrous economic bubble of the epoch's tulip-mania.

Because construction of the building wasn't completed until immediately before the opening, LACMA curator Lynn Zelevansky and Director Michael Govan had no chance to get to know the six loft-like gallery spaces they had to install with art. So the installation has some problems, such as temporary walls creating narrow, hallway-like rooms on the light-filled top floor.

But one installation is inspired. Three dozen of Sherman's photographic self-portraits, in which she dresses up as a wide variety of art-inspired personalities, are installed in the 19th century Victorian manner -- floor-to-ceiling and edge-to-edge -- like pictorial wallpaper. The Gilded Age attraction to buying art in bulk to provide a refined pedigree for the super-rich is devastatingly lampooned.

In one Sherman self-portrait, she's a grotesque painted clown, the artist as culture's jester, who has twisted balloons into a dog for the kiddies. Upstairs, Koons' monumental sculpture "Balloon Dog (Blue)" holds court over a main room. As our own period of opulent self-indulgence unravels, her work offers a welcome sense of refuge.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com