Amid news that the Museum of Contemporary Art is facing a financial disaster -- and unconfirmed reports that MOCA trustees are pursuing a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- leaders of other Southern California cultural institutions have reacted with dismay.
"MOCA has to survive," said Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. "The people who care about it really have to rally to it. The city has to understand how important it is in terms of civic pride and culture."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, November 22, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 81 words Type of Material: Correction
MOCA changes: In an article in Friday's Calendar section about the Museum of Contemporary Art, artist and MOCA trustee Barbara Kruger was misquoted. In speaking of the programming at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space, Kruger said, "The level of ambition and seriousness, without the intrusion of demands from a museum bureaucracy, exists nowhere else." She did not say, as the story had it, "the level of curatorial ambition and furiousness, without the intrusion of demands from a museum bureaucracy, exists nowhere else."
Hoping to avert a potential disaster, Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, said: "This is a perfect opportunity for a major donor to step up and make sure that MOCA can prevail. If we don't save this museum, we will lose something that is essential to the life and mind and spirit of the city."
The Times reported this week that MOCA has run so short of operating funds that Director Jeremy Strick is seeking large donations of cash and that the trustees may be considering such options as merging the museum with another institution or sharing its collection. Federal tax returns show that well before the current national crisis, the museum had drained its reserves and dipped into restricted funds to keep up with routine expenses.
Although rumors of MOCA's woes have traveled through art circles for weeks, the drastic measures under consideration came as a shock to many arts leaders.
But Steven D. Lavine, president of California Institute of the Arts, said MOCA's money problems, challenging as they may be, are hardly unique.
"Being able to operate on hope is critical to nonprofit institutions," he said. "Great institutions are formed by visionaries who are driven by ambition and a will to achieve a goal. It isn't surprising that the vision sometimes gets out in front of finances. It's most common in theater companies, which use next season's ticket sales to pay last season's expenses. They get caught in a treadmill that they can't get off."
Los Angeles has plenty of room for a contemporary art museum, Lavine said, even though LACMA includes contemporary material in its broad holdings. "You wouldn't think it was right for Chicago to have only the Art Institute of Chicago and not its Museum of Contemporary Art," he said. "In New York, the fact that the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art show contemporary work doesn't mean you don't need the Whitney, or because you have the Whitney, you don't need the New Museum."
