Museums in Southern California seem to be losing their collective minds.
First downtown's Museum of Contemporary Art spent big chunks of its endowment on day-to-day expenses. Then the Orange County Museum of Art secretly sold some of its paintings to a private collector. And now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the museum of record in ground zero for the film industry, is killing its movie program. What are these people drinking?
I know, I know, the official word from LACMA Director Michael Govan is that the film program is not dead but on some half-baked hiatus while he puts his best minds to work "reconsidering the nature, scale and scope" of what the museum is doing.
You'll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that "we had to burn the village to save it." That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation's pros and cons while things are up and running doesn't give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.
More than that, as Isaac Newton, no film buff, once observed, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, which means that once something is killed it's harder to get it reanimated. Especially if that revival is tied, as it apparently is, to raising millions of dollars for an endowment. I can just see the crocodile tears flowing when the museum says it tried ever so hard but just couldn't raise those needed funds.
If I am being a little tough on the museum, and I know I am, it's because their reasons for doing what they've just done seem especially specious. LACMA's thinking may seem just fine in the abstract but it doesn't hold up under any kind of examination.
Take the question of the program's million-dollar loss. That's a nice round number, but it turns out to be a cumulative loss over a 10-year period. Broken down to $100,000 a year (and several museum sources tell me it has been more like $70,000 in recent years), it's a drop in the bucket in an annual budget of more than $50 million. Especially in a city with the powerful connection to film Los Angeles has.
Even if you think that those losses are too big to ignore, consider the reasons for them. Successful programs require healthy budgets, and it has been an open secret for years that the money LACMA has put into its film program has redefined the concept of operating on a shoestring. Axing it because not enough people are coming is like starving someone half to death and then firing them because they're too thin.
