Art Museums

The sculpture of a giant black Labrador outside the Orange County Museum of Art looks friendly, nose to the sky and tail up. But with a hind leg cocked, "Bad Dog" is designed to spray gallons of yellow paint through a powerful gear pump onto the museum building. "We'll see how long it lasts. I don't think it's such a big deal, but you never know how people will react," said Richard Jackson, the 73-year-old artist behind the dog. "Sometimes people feel they should protect their children from such things, then the kids go home and watch 'South Park.'" Jackson made "Bad Dog" for his first museum retrospective, opening in Orange County on Sunday.

NEW YORK -- It's one of the biggest art museums in the world, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan can also be one of the costliest to visit.  Not even the Louvre in Paris charges near the Met's top ticket price of $25. Now, a class-action lawsuit seeks to change things for the visitors who suffer sticker shock as they hand over an admission fee that -- according to the complaint -- they don't have to pay. In fact, $25 is only a recommendation, as the sign at the cashier's desk says, but “recommended” is written in “tiny un-bolded print” beneath the list of suggested fees and is either overlooked or misunderstood by most of the millions of people who visit the museum each year, according to the lawsuit filed this month.

If you like paint, you'll like "Richard Jackson: Ain't Painting a Pain," the artist's 40-year retrospective exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. It's awash in the stuff. Thick, brightly colored paint oozes like mortar from between thousands of canvases stacked like bricks into a kind of room-size temple, and it's smeared in rainbows that unfurl across white walls. It's shot from a pellet gun at a big drawing and out of the rear ends of carousel animals toward spinning canvases and sculptures on surrounding walls.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made a formal proposal to acquire the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which has been struggling with financial troubles and staff and board defections. LACMA Director Michael Govan and the two co-chairs of his board made the offer in a Feb. 24 letter to the MOCA board co-chairs, laying out the rationale for an acquisition. The letter said that LACMA would preserve MOCA's two downtown locations and operate them under the MOCA name, according to people who have seen the letter but were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Strong support for California's ambitious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming was reconfirmed in a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, showing once more the state's celebrated environmental consciousness. So perhaps it's time at least to ring a warning bell about a puzzling situation in Los Angeles' cultural environment, rather than its natural one. At area art museums, the job of chief curator appears to be edging toward the endangered species list.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has proposed acquiring the troubled Museum of Contemporary Art - a move that would combine the biggest art collection west of the Mississippi with one of the world's most prestigious troves of contemporary art. The acquisition could put to rest long-standing concerns over the financial viability of the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA. But it also faces potential opposition from the region's most influential art patron, billionaire Eli Broad.

Overall attendance at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has dropped this year, but its art museums are attracting record crowds, officials reported this week. The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum have drawn nearly a quarter-million people to the Reynolds Center since it reopened in early July. That is a dramatic upturn; the museums had never drawn more than 450,000 a year.