Hasta La Ideas

Compared to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art‘s year of thrills and spills, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has had it pretty easy, beginning with the announcement last October that they’d be getting a $45 million donation to build a new Renzo Piano building. But while they’ve faired better than others in this particularly brutal, museum-feasting downturn in the economy, the LA Times reports that they’ve suddenly found themselves in another predicament: they’ve had too many retirements and resignations among their curating staff and now they’re in the middle of a hiring freeze. Though the LACMA says the freeze won’t affect finding replacements, we’ve seen how incredibly difficult and lengthy it can be to do said finding. But at least the LACMA isn’t facing immediate closures or mass-layoffs at the moment, so they should be able to sleep a little easier than many museums. Here’s a bit from Michael Govan:

“The recession is not helping me find a Chinese curator,” he says. “There’s a dearth of people who are able to run museums, so highly qualified curators are moving into those jobs.

“But you have to put all this in perspective. Turnover is good, especially when you are making transitions and doing new things. We haven’t been pushing people out. We are gaining more friends in high places. One of the marks of quality of a museum is that its curators move up in the world.”

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No one, it seems, is safe from the mighty blow of a ruined economy. We’ve long since lost count of how many museums and other cultural institutions we’ve talked about here who have found themselves in troubled waters. But this one in particular hurts extra bad, because we’ve always been such fans. Caught on Brown University‘s Daily Herald and also recently written about at The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island School of Design‘s Museum of Art is the latest to be hit. Despite big attendance numbers (which we’ve learned doesn’t always mean safety), the museum will be closing for the month of August and layoffs and early retirements have already taken place, all in response to a RISD’s shrinking endowments. Here’s a bit:

As for the decision to close the museum in August, [director Hope Alswang] says that she and her staff considered several options, including closing the museum on Tuesdays while remaining open year-round. In the end, closing the museum for one month each year made the most sense.

“We knew we couldn’t just nibble around the edges,” Alswang says. “We knew we had to find a solution that matched the problem — in this case, a truly harrowing drop in the museum’s endowment portfolio.”

We feel awful that, while this writer was out yesterday, he wasn’t able to scream “Get out! Get out! Fire!” at you. This, of course, would have only applied to you had you been in the Getty Center, which was completely evacuated Wednesday and Thursday because it was in danger of getting devoured by California’s ever-present hillside fires (which was illustrated on their site with that image attached to this post). Fortunately we won’t be riddled with a lifetime of guilt because nothing wound up being damaged, the fire was contained, and the museum will re-open today. Though if you want to see some fire footage licking the Getty’s heels, for you sickos in the audience, we recommend checking out the BBC‘s coverage.

This writer’s brain is still a bit muddy after a return from such a long, restful weekend, so before we turn you over to Stephanie’s far more able-minded coverage for the afternoon shift, we quickly focus our attention on this weird little story out of San Jose, California, where the UPI reports on Pez candy company filing a lawsuit against the Museum of Pez Memorabilia for their building of a nearly eight foot tall Pez dispenser (which they constructed back in 2007 and won them the Guinness World Record for “world’s largest candy dispenser”). Pez is apparently very unhappy with the large recreation of their product and has gone after the museum with a trademark infringement suit, asking that the giant snowman be destroyed. Because, after all, we all know that there’s nothing worse than having your product celebrated and enjoyed. For shame, small museum. Here’s a video about the horrible, horrible snowman:

On the other side of the coin, following that last post about hard times, we have the opposite over at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art who have announced that everything’s fine and dandy with them again on the financial end. Just a few short months ago, you’ll recall that the museum was only a few steps from an untimely death, forcing billionaire Eli Broad to step in and throw down $30 million to keep it afloat. Now the museum has said, on top of Broad’s massive contribution, they’ve also raised nearly that same amount from other donors (mostly members of their board), bringing their total haul to $56.9 million and thus making everything good again for them. We’re thinking, after seeing a turnaround this quick, it’s probably always a good idea to get in friendly with Eli Broad and his rolodex if you ever find yourself running a museum. Also couldn’t hurt to be in Los Angeles either, given the types of people who live in the area and their inflated pocketbooks — just take a look at some of the members of their new board (which replaces those who left in protest earlier this year):

In other MOCA board business Thursday, trustees re-elected Jeffrey Soros as president, and Fred Sands, who recently donated $2 million, was chosen as vice president. Three new trustees were elected: writer-producer Darren Star, whose credits include “Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210”; Carolyn Clark Powers, who also is on the collectors’ committee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Music Center‘s dance association; and Marc I. Stern, an investment executive who chairs Los Angeles Opera and is a board member of the Music Center, California Science Center and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.