Eli Broad

For more than half a century, Eli Broad has taken inspiration from a paperweight on his desk, a gift from his wife, Edythe, that has become the cornerstone for a new "how to" book for anyone who might wonder "What would Eli do?" On it is a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. " Broad has called his 165-page text, written with former Los Angeles Times staffer Swati Pandey, "The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking.

Record spending will continue in the last remaining race for a seat on the Los Angeles school board, as a political action committee has put together a war chest of about $600,000 to use on behalf of a candidate endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In all, the Coalition for School Reform, which is spearheaded by the mayor, has raised nearly $4.5 million for three Board of Education races to support candidates who would back the aggressive policies of Supt. John Deasy and pledge to keep him on the job. Contributors praise Deasy for including student test scores in teacher evaluations and limiting job protections that they view as impediments to academic progress.

Eli Broad returned to his alma mater Michigan State University over the weekend to inaugurate a new contemporary art museum that bears his name. The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum had a formal dedication on Saturday and opened to the public on Sunday. The museum on the university's East Lansing campus was designed by architect Zaha Hadid. Broad gave $28 million to MSU in 2007 for the creation of the museum -- $21 million going toward construction of the facility and $7 million for acquisitions, exhibitions and other functions.

Trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art announced Wednesday that they have raised more than $50 million since the middle of March for the museum's endowment. A larger endowment is widely seen as the first step to turning around the troubled institution. Last month trustees identified $100 million as the goal for its endowment campaign, saying that donations and pledges had brought it up to $60 million. But they declined to name specific donors or provide a timeline for when they would receive the money.

Usually, Eli Broad's trajectory as an art collector is traced to mentoring by the late Taft Schreiber. Broad himself has talked admiringly of what he learned about art from the MCA Inc. executive (and Ronald Reagan's former Hollywood agent), whose small but extraordinary trove of works by Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Alberto Giacometti and 10 others was a magnanimous 1989 gift to the Museum of Contemporary Art from the estate of Schreiber's widow, Rita. Still, another, even more celebrated name in the annals of Los Angeles art collecting ought not to be discounted, even if the influence was perhaps more indirect.

Eli Broad remains among the top 10 collectors in the world, according to the 2012 annual ARTnews list, which was published this week. The magazine released the list of the world's top 200 art collectors, among whom are a number of wealthy individuals with ties to Southern California. Broad and his wife, Edythe, have placed in ARTnews' top 10 for several years running. This year, they are joined by several other familiar faces -- Francois Pinault, Philip Niarchos, Pierre Chen, Alexandra and Steven A. Cohen, Debra and Leon Black, Helene and Bernard Arnault, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, Dmitri Mavromatis and Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Eli Broad remains among the top ten collectors in the world according to the 2012 annual ARTnews list, which was published this week. The magazine released the list of the world's top 200 art collectors, among whom are a number of wealthy individuals with ties to Southern California. Broad and his wife, Edythe, have placed in ARTnews' top ten for several years running. This year, they are joined by several other familiar faces -- Francois Pinault, Philip Niarchos, Pierre Chen, Alexandra and Steven A. Cohen, Debra and Leon Black, Helene and Bernard Arnault, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, Dmitri Mavromatis and Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

"This is not a one-philanthropist town," Eli Broad wrote in an op-ed for The Times in 2008. Architects who have closely followed the billionaire's civic activities over the last two decades might disagree. As a donor, client and behind-the-scenes power broker, Broad has had a hand in a remarkable number of high-profile buildings in Southern California during that period, including projects by Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Cesar Pelli and Frank Gehry. Broad hopes to add to that list by hiring a top-tier architect for a museum on Bunker Hill holding his own extensive art collection, the first art museum built downtown since architect Arata Isozaki's 1986 Museum of Contemporary Art. (As MOCA's founding chairman, Broad had a hand in that one too.)

Inside the 12th floor conference room of his Broad Foundation in Westwood sat Eli Broad, the man the art world wanted to hear from after the forced resignation of Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. Broad, who helped found MOCA in 1979 and is now its biggest donor, didn't have an official vote in the museum board's decision to oust Schimmel - his status as a "life trustee" means he's not a voting member....

There's a misguided notion in the land that baseball games last too long. It's really the proposed sale of the Dodgers that threatens to drag on past endurance. Fortunately, Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad has offered a good solution: He will spend the necessary $430 million, most of it cash, to buy his hometown team if the current proposed buyer cannot. It should mean there's no need to extend the Jan.

Bruce Karatz, one of three new members elected this week to the board of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, said in an interview Wednesday that he's taken an interest in MOCA since the late 1970s, when it didn't even exist. During an art event in the south of France - Karatz was then head of homebuilder KB Home's French division - he listened to his boss and mentor, Eli Broad, discuss the need for a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles with Marcia Simon Weisman, another key figure in MOCA's launch.

The Corona-Norco Unified School District was named as a finalist Thursday for the prestigious Broad Prize, which honors academic excellence by minority and low-income students in urban districts across the nation. The Riverside County district is one of four finalists for the prize to be announced in September. The winning district will receive $550,000 in college scholarships for seniors in the class of 2013. The other three will each receive $150,000 in scholarships. The other finalists are the San Diego Unified School District, Houston Independent School District and Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina.

In the three decades since the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in a temporary space downtown in 1983, it has been variously flush with money and desperate for a bailout after having squandered its endowment. It's had great directors and controversial ones, good shows and bad shows, dissension in the ranks of its board, years of high attendance and periods of anemic crowds. Although its ranking among museums internationally has been somewhat diminished by the rise of newer, more ambitious institutions and its curatorial staff is a fraction of what it once was, its permanent collection remains one of the most acclaimed in the world.

At first glance, two stories much in the news in Los Angeles of late would seem to have nothing to do with each other. The first concerns the fate of the Museum of Contemporary Art - whether it will affiliate with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or USC or the National Gallery in Washington - and the outsized role its primary benefactor, Eli Broad, is likely to play in the choice. The second concerns the low voter turnout in the first round of the city's mayoral election this month.

Michael Govan came to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seven years ago with a mission to make it one of the most prestigious institutions in the country, one worth mentioning alongside New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. Now he's trying to seize an opportunity to gain ground on them in a single stroke. Govan and LACMA's trustees have proposed a takeover of L.A.'s financially adrift Museum of Contemporary Art and its crown jewels: a 6,000-piece collection that's one of the world's most admired troves of post-World War II art. But Govan has an imposing rival in billionaire Eli Broad, L.A.'s eminence grise of art philanthropy.

The troubled Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is in talks for a possible partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a development that could cloud MOCA's acquisition by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The talks were initiated by billionaire Eli Broad, the MOCA board member and leading donor who opposed a 2008 attempt by the county museum to take over MOCA. According to National Gallery board Chairman John Wilmerding, the talks have focused on ways in which the federally funded museum in Washington, D.C. might help MOCA create fresh exhibitions.

Los Angeles billionaireEli Broad'sfoundation has held back promised contributions to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which former MOCA Chief Executive Charles Young says is not allowed under Broad's 2008 pledge agreement with the museum. Half of the Broad Foundation's $30-million pledge to MOCA is for exhibitions and is to be paid in $750,000 quarterly installments through 2013. Bloomberg News reported this week that payments had not been made. On Friday, a MOCA spokeswoman declined to comment when asked whether the April 1 and July 1 exhibition payments - totaling $1.5 million - were made, or whether the museum had asked for the funds and been refused.

Late in 2008, when the critically revered but financially teetering Museum of Contemporary Art was mulling rival rescue plans to pull it back from the brink of collapse, two issues were paramount. More than four years later, even as news breaks of yet more proposed solutions to MOCA's lingering distress, they still are. One issue was the need to vastly increase the museum's paltry endowment, which had never come close to being adequate for a 30-year-old institution whose ambitious mission -- and achievement -- was international leadership as "the defining museum of contemporary art. " The other was autonomy.

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.