The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are among the most important public buildings to open in Los Angeles in decades. Twenty years in the making and costing more than $700 million, the project is meant to be a signature cultural landmark for the city as Los Angeles prepares to host the World Cup and the Olympics. It has been funded and supported by some of the biggest names in Southern California, along with international backers who clearly understand LACMA’s importance as a global museum.
All of which makes the experience of visiting the new building both fascinating and oddly frustrating.
I grew up in Southern California and first visited LACMA roughly sixty years ago. Since then, I have been back many times and have long been a member of the museum. For most of its life, LACMA was organized in a way that any regular museum visitor would immediately understand. European paintings were near other European paintings. Asian art had its own section. Modern art, decorative art, photography, sculpture—each had a recognizable home. You could disagree with the curatorial choices, but at least you understood the map.
The new Geffen Galleries reject almost all of that. Chronology, geography, medium, and traditional art-historical categories have been pushed aside. There is also no obvious path through the galleries. The building invites wandering, which sounds liberating in theory. In practice, it can feel more like drifting.
The responsibility of replacing tradition
This is not necessarily a bad idea. Museums should not be mausoleums. There is nothing sacred about organizing art strictly by century or country. A great museum can surprise you by putting objects in conversation with one another across time and place. A 17th-century painting, a contemporary photograph, and an ancient sculpture may illuminate one another in ways a standard textbook arrangement never would.
But if a museum abandons familiar organizing principles, it has to replace them with something equally compelling. At the Geffen, that “something” is often hard to find.
In one small gallery, the stated theme was music and art. The room included a rural photograph by Gordon Parks and images of waves by Ansel Adams. Both were wonderful images. Both were worth seeing. But the connection to music was, at best, obscure. A visitor could certainly invent a connection—rhythm, repetition, mood, silence, movement—but the gallery did not do enough to make the idea feel inevitable, or even especially persuasive.
Elsewhere, in one of the large open spaces, a man was lying on the floor next to a BMX bike. Eventually, he got up and moved around the space, though he did not ride the bike. People watched, but the mood seemed less like artistic engagement than collective uncertainty. There was a lot of “what the hell?” in the room.
That, in miniature, is the problem. The building seems designed around the idea that removing familiar structure will force visitors to look harder, think more deeply, and make their own connections. Maybe that will work for some people. But for many visitors—especially the large number of people who are not regular museumgoers—it may have the opposite effect. Without a clear framework, they may simply give up.
The irony is that the building itself is often more compelling than the art experience inside it.
The biggest struggle of the museum may be the museum itself
The Geffen Galleries sit on an elevated second floor at the heart of the LACMA campus. From inside, the large glass windows offer spectacular views of the surrounding cityscape: the museum campus, the Hollywood Hills, the Academy Museum, and the La Brea Tar Pits. Most dramatically, the building stretches across Wilshire Boulevard, one of the great urban corridors of Los Angeles. From the Geffen, you can look down Wilshire in a way that was never before possible.
That may be the building’s greatest achievement. It gives Los Angeles a new vantage point on itself. This is not a museum sealed off from the city. It is perched above it, connected to it, almost suspended inside it. For a travel visitor, that alone makes it worth seeing. Few buildings in Los Angeles so clearly remind you where you are.
The architecture is also more inviting than photographs might suggest. The building is largely gray concrete, which sounds forbidding, but it is not cold. The curves soften it. The openness gives it life. The concrete provides a strong, neutral backdrop for the art and a certain seriousness without becoming brutal. It is not a decorative building, but it has presence. It feels like an event.
And that may be part of the difficulty. The architecture has such confidence that the galleries need to work even harder to hold their own. Instead, too often, the art feels oddly unmoored. You move from object to object without always understanding why these works are near one another or what you are supposed to take from the encounter.
For an experienced museum visitor, this can be mildly irritating. For a casual visitor, it can be alienating.
Compelling, ambitious, and absolutely worth it?
That matters because LACMA now has a tremendous opportunity. The new Geffen Galleries are attracting huge crowds, many of whom may not normally spend a day in an art museum. Some will come because the building is famous. Some will come because they are curious. Some will come because it is the new thing to do in Los Angeles. This is exactly the moment when a museum should welcome people in and help them discover why art matters.
Instead, too many visitors may leave thinking they admired the building more than they enjoyed the art.
The contrast is especially striking because LACMA itself knows how to do this better. Just down the walkway, in the Resnick Pavilion, there was a brilliant exhibition of Impressionist painting and a comprehensive display of Indian art. In both cases, the galleries gave me enough structure to understand what I was seeing and enough freedom to make my own discoveries. I spent time looking. I learned something. I left wanting more.
That is the sweet spot. A great museum experience should not spoon-feed the visitor, but it should not leave the visitor stranded either. It should create enough order to encourage curiosity, not so much confusion that the visitor retreats into the architecture.
The new Geffen Galleries are compelling, ambitious, and absolutely worth visiting. As a piece of urban architecture, they may be a triumph. As a place to see art, they are still a puzzle. Perhaps that is intentional. Perhaps the museum believes the public will grow into the new approach. Maybe, over time, the galleries will be refined, the themes made clearer, and the visitor experience strengthened.
For now, the Geffen feels like a bold experiment that has not yet solved its central problem. It has given Los Angeles a remarkable new building. It still needs to become a remarkable museum.
