Architects of Philanthropy


Stephen Hitchins takes a look at the problem of museum funding and at the different ways Europe and the USA are tackling it


François Pinault – The Son of a farmer in western Brittany and a high-school dropout, a man who famously did not visit a museum until his 30s, now a French luxury goods magnate, the owner of Christie’s, Gucci and Yves St Laurent – announced last year his plans to create a private museum in the former Commodities Exchange next to the newly opened La Canopée on the site of Les Halles in Paris.

Erected by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières in the 18th century to store corn and flour, the building was remodelled at the end of the 19th century to house the Commodities Exchange. Few Parisians have ever seen inside it. The 40m-wide circular hall with its 24 adjacent arches and a cupola the size of the Pantheon in Rome is quite a sight/site. And located on a prime piece of real estate between the Rue Saint-Honoré with its boutiques selling his luxury products, the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, for Pinault it is ideal.

Frank Gehry designed the museum for Bernard Arnault in 2014Frank Gehry designed the museum for Bernard Arnault in 2014.

He failed with his plans for a museum in a former Renault plant on the Île Seguin in the Seine in what became a decades-long quest for somewhere to showcase his collection of contemporary art. Meanwhile, he restored a historic palazzo and the Punta della Dogana in Venice to display some of the pieces, many of which he acquired directly from artists who for once, rather wonderfully for a wealthy collector, included unknown ones. His architect for the restoration of Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, Tadao Ando, together with the conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, will oversee the change of use and renovations in Paris. The project received planning permission at the end of May and is due for completion in 2018.

The self-made man had become an artistic Doge, having finally made his move to become un grand mécène de l’art at home in France and setting the seal on an artistic storm that has been brewing up for years.

Paris’s Commodities Exchange, dating from the 1700s, is slated as a private museum for luxury goods magnate François PinaultParis’s Commodities Exchange, dating from the 1700s, is slated as a private museum for luxury goods magnate François Pinault

Rival tycoon Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH Moët Henessy Louis Vuitton and the auctioneer Phillips, opened his private museum in a grand architectural gesture that pushed back the boundaries of conventional construction in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne in 2014. Designed by Frank Gehry, a transparent cloud of a building with all the lightness of late 19th-century glass and garden architecture, it clearly drove rival Pinault even harder to find a site on which to realise his dream of matching Arnault, mano a mano, billionaire to billionaire.

Using Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in VeniceUsing Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in Venice

Gehry used aeronautical technology from Dassault Systèmes to benefit his artistic creation, with glass curved to the nearest millimetre for the 3,600 panels that form the Foundation’s 12 sails soaring above the park and the 19,000 panels of Ductal, fibre re-inforced concrete. It cost just €300m, three times the original estimate.

Using Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in VeniceUsing Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in Venice

Ando will not have the same freedom, but he will be working in the heart of the city, where Pinault hopes to score points in the continuing duel with his nemesis. It is revenge by art. Art dominates their lives and it is their battleground. One buys a Rothko, the other matches with Koons and Hirst; one weighs in with a 15-tonne Serra for a chateau in Yvelines, the other responds with a 40-tonne piece by Serra for his HQ; one gets a Richter, the other trumps this with Rauschenburg, eight of them. As they spar, Paris wins, as it seeks to regain its lustre as the capital of art. Pinault sells a lot. Arnault holds.

Using Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in VeniceUsing Tadao Ando and conservation specialist Pierre-Antoine Gatier, Pinault had the Palazzo Grassi restored as his private gallery in Venice

Advantage Arnault. A private collection, albeit one that is not hidden away, versus a private passion driving a corporate collection made to enhance the image of a group, these two will not let up. Having bent the consumer society to their artistic ends, these two businessmen are scoring points off one another in a struggle for cultural supremacy. In Paris capitalism has now embraced art with a vengeance.

Louvre, Abu Dhabi. €525m was paid to use the name Louvre Abu Dhabi on the Jean Nouvel buildingLouvre, Abu Dhabi. €525m was paid to use the name Louvre Abu Dhabi on the Jean Nouvel building

In the hunt for new revenue streams as a hedge against the decline in government funding, the Van Gogh Museum has this year started a programme offering its professional services to private collectors and business.

These will range from conservation to installation, museum management and educational programmes. Given its public mission, there will be questions over curatorial independence if and when the museum is seen to be giving advice with regards to the auction market.

Louvre, Abu Dhabi. €525m was paid to use the name Louvre Abu Dhabi on the Jean Nouvel buildingLouvre, Abu Dhabi. €525m was paid to use the name Louvre Abu Dhabi on the Jean Nouvel building

The permanent collection is in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed building opened in 1973, with temporary exhibits housed in a separate building opened in 1999 designed by Kisho Kuokawa – who also contributed sketch proposals for a link (subsequently developed and realised by Hans van Heeswijk as a new entrance hall). Museums such as the British Museum and the Louvre have been offering advice and professional services to governments and other institutions for some time.

Just when the Rijksmuseum’s 1885 building (below) was restored in 2013 after a 10-year, €375m programme, government funding was reduced – now it has 15 fundraising staff and a more aggressive loans policy. Image Credit: Erik SmitsJust when the Rijksmuseum’s 1885 building (below) was restored in 2013 after a 10-year, €375m programme, government funding was reduced – now it has 15 fundraising staff and a more aggressive loans policy. Image Credit: Erik Smits

The United Arab Emirates paid €525m for the privilege of using the name Louvre Abu Dhabi, along with €747m for loans and special exhibitions. Originally, due for completion in 2012, the €100m new building by Jean Nouvel on Saadiyat Island is now due to be finished this year. Evoking an emblematic feature of Arabian architecture reminiscent of mosque, mausoleum and madrasa, part of the museum will be covered by a white dome, 180m in diameter, which will dramatically extend out over the water.

Just when the Rijksmuseum’s 1885 building (below) was restored in 2013 after a 10-year, €375m programme, government funding was reduced – now it has 15 fundraising staff and a more aggressive loans policy. Image Credit: Erik SmitsJust when the Rijksmuseum’s 1885 building (below) was restored in 2013 after a 10-year, €375m programme, government funding was reduced – now it has 15 fundraising staff and a more aggressive loans policy. Image Credit: Erik Smits

Selling expertise, franchising a name, museums in Europe are also shifting towards American ways of giving where favourable tax laws have sustained a culture of private philanthropy and spawned a multitude of development officers. Rafael Moneo’s 22,000 sq m new entrance hall and temporary exhibition space, together with the restoration of the former Jerónimos Cloister at the Prado were completed in 2008 just as economic recession became a way of life in Spain. Since then the Amigos del Museo del Prado has become crucial to the museum since government support in 2015 fell from 64.9 per cent to just 32.4 per cent of its €38.5m budget.

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building (renderings shown). A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter Zumthor

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building. A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter Zumthor

Again, it was just when the Rijksmuseum’s 1885 Cuypers building was finally restored to its original glory in 2013 – after 10 years of renovation and redesign by Cruz y Ortiz that cost €375m – it saw government funding drop from 70 per cent to 40 per cent and the need for a development office that now has 15 fundraising staff, and its policy on loans becoming far more aggressive.

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building (renderings shown). A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter Zumthor

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building. A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter Zumthor

Tate Americas began with a $6m gift in 1989 and has since raised $300m. In France, where the government funding of the Louvre fell to 50 per cent in 2014, corporations receive significant incentives to reduce their tax burden by charitable giving, whereas individuals do not. However, tax write-offs from gifts to what are classed as a 501(c)(3) for individuals in the USA encouraged the creation of American Friends of the Louvre in 2002 and American Friends of the Orsay in 2009, and both have delivered considerable funds since.

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building (renderings shown). A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter ZumthorPhilip Johnson’s 1964 black steel and glass east wing of MOMA New York is to be named after Ken Griffin, Illinois’ richest man who recently gave one of the largest monetary gifts in MOMA’s history

In the USA, it is the private galleries that face different and unexpected pressures. Where once they might have customarily given scholarly support to a museum, now they are regularly asked for money. As corporate donations have fallen and the costs of mounting exhibitions has risen inexorably, non-profit museums have taken to asking for hard cash when curating the work of an artist represented by a commercial gallery, anything up to $250,000 a time. The prestige of the show will almost inevitably raise the profile of the artists and the value of their work, and the gallery’s profits will increase commensurate with their commission on sales. So the thinking goes, why not ask? Deals are tailored to the gallery’s financial capacity and include anything from the expenses incurred for a private view, catalogue production, shipping and installation to, at an extreme, the costs associated with the creation of new work specifically for the show.

The permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is to be housed in the new Peter Zumthor building (renderings shown). A total of $475m of private support has been raised to see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023. Image Credit: Peter ZumthorMOMA New York’s Rockefeller building. The Rockefeller family has been pivotal to MOMA’s development since its earliest days in the Twenties

The Marianne Boesky and Dominique Lévy galleries supported the Frank Stella installation at the Whitney; Gargosian supported the German photographer Vera Lutter’s exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Marian Goodman Gallery supported the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mount a Pierre Huyghe show.

Life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Iwaan BaanLife trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Iwaan Baan

It has reached a point where The Art Newspaper noted that between 2007 and 2013 a third of the major solo exhibitions at museums in the USA featured artists represented by just five galleries: Gargosian, Pace, Marian Goodman, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth. You may draw your own conclusions about the state of the market when a small number of galleries appear on the face of it to be a funding source for public exhibitions as part of their undertaking to promote artists. Who wins? The public, the museums, or the private galleries?

In London, the V&A plans an outpost at Stratford in a seven-storey, 18,000 sq m building opposite Hadid’s aquatics centre as part of the cultural and educational quarter within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, due to open in 2020/21. Something Boris could not resist dubbing ‘Olympicopolis’, only a fraction of the financing has so far been committed. Whereas, in the centre of town, for a mere £5m, the new Exhibition Road entrance to the V&A will be named Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man when it opens later this year. With an estimated fortune of £13bn, Blavatnik has been a sponsor of the arts in Britain for years, subsidising exhibitions at institutions such as the British Museum and the National Gallery and donating to projects such as The Tanks at Tate Modern.

Life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Iwaan BaanLife trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Iwaan Baan

At the V&A, where Amanda Levete is responsible for the overall project, Blavatnik joins other philanthropic names emblazoned across the building on the Weston Cast Court, the Sackler Centre for Arts Education, and the Porter Gallery that houses temporary displays.

In the land of the free this has been going on for some time. The pressures are mounting, even in the USA but the gifts are much larger. Museums and galleries receive the kind of gifts their European cousins can only dream about.

On West 53rd between 5th and 6th, Philip Johnson’s 1964 black steel and glass East Wing at the Museum of Modern Art is to be named after Ken Griffin, a Chicago hedge-fund billionaire and Illinois’ richest man, who recently gave one of the largest monetary gifts in the museum’s history. Having taken over the site of its former neighbour, the American Folk Art Museum, a building only completed in 2001 and now torn down as part of MoMA’s ambitions, a Jean Nouvel tower known as 53W53 is going up in its place. MoMA sold the air rights to Hines, the Texas developer overseeing the project, for $14.2m in 2014.

Life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Ben Gibbs

Nevertheless, following an unrestricted $100m gift to MoMA in May 2016, the residential tower will include three floors of new galleries to be known as the David Geffen Wing, a companion to the fourth-floor exhibition space in the original building that will be renamed the David Geffen Galleries.

Having now raised $650m, MoMA has succumbed to criticism levelled at it, by trimming back some of the excesses in its original proposals for further enlargement as envisaged in a sweeping redesign by Diller Scofidio + Renfro at a cost of $400m plus $40m of renovations. Following a major reconfiguration by Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004, at an overall cost of $858m, annual attendance has doubled to three million visitors a year.

To meet its financial demands, the number of exhibitions has increased from 15 to 35 a year. New plans will add around 4,60 sq m of exhibition space, and address some of the problems of circulation and overcrowding that have arisen from the last replan, together with attempting to address an aura of coldness that has been attributed to it. A new gallery on the ground floor will be visible from the street and free to enter. It will have two exhibition spaces, one of which will be double height and used for the museum’s Project Series for new art and emerging artists.

Life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Iwaan BaanLife trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and with his wife Edythe an assiduous collector of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Eli Broad now has his own museum, The Broad, across Grand Avenue from MoCA in Los Angeles. Image Credit: Warren Air

At The Met or MoMA, a few hundred thousand dollars might get you an invite to dinner but not your name on so much as a filing cabinet. But lesser-known institutions have to do things differently to attract attention and funding. At the New Museum of Contemporary Art the Sterns have their names on the toilets. The Jerome and Ellen Stern Restrooms grace the seven-storey, eight-level structure at 235 Bowery designed by the Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA. At the time of its construction, the 83-year old retired venture capitalist Jerome Stern was quoted as saying ‘I thought it would be nice to see my name in a place where I’m going to spend a lot of time.’

The naming culture of New York City manifests itself in less unconventional ways, from the American Museum of Natural History that offers naming opportunities for its dinosaur exhibits at various levels from $50,000 to $1m, to Carnegie Hall where $20m got Ronald O Perelman’s name on the stage in the Isaac Stern Auditorium. But there can be dangers by association: The Metropolitan Opera had to remove the large letters spelling out Alberto W Vilar from its wall when he failed to make good on his million-dollar pledges and was later convicted of fraud.

The Folk Art Museum has relocated to Columbus Avenue across from the Lincoln Center, another site of Geffen generosity. Last year Geffen gave $100m towards renovating the home of the New York Philharmonic, the Avery Fisher Hall. The design team for the project is Heatherwick Studio together with Diamond Schmitt of Toronto. They beat Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which had redesigned the public spaces at the Lincoln Center in a makeover completed in 2012.

In the hunt for new revenue streams as a hedge against the decline in government funding, the Van Gogh Museum has started offering its professional services to private collectors, and business, ranging from conservation to installation, museum management and educational programmesIn the hunt for new revenue streams as a hedge against the decline in government funding, the Van Gogh Museum has started offering its professional services to private collectors, and business, ranging from conservation to installation, museum management and educational programmes

Heatherwick is both the polymath of the moment with no signature style capable of pulling symbolic and graceful crowd-pleasing architectural rabbits out of a hat as well as a designer with a record of attracting significant public funds for what are essentially private projects. His project for the Hudson River Park, for which the City of New York has committed $17m, but is now largely funded by Barry Diller and his wife Diane von Furstenberg is way over budget and further fuels the district’s transformation into a wealthy enclave. The Garden Bridge in London is a very expensive project that is around a third funded by government and serves little purpose other than that it would be nice to have.

Both raise the spectre of ambitious, unasked-for gifts wished on communities that could make better use of the public funds involved while acknowledging that private philanthropy allied with great art gives great cities the landmarks they need. The Lincoln Center project will cost more than $500m, but Geffen captured naming rights with his gift despite the Fisher family threatening legal action over a change of name.

Some $100m is about the going rate for a major building with your name on it in New York. In 2008, David H. Koch, the oil and gas billionaire, gave that sum to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center that now bears his name; the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman gave that for renovation of the New York Public Library’s flagship on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street and is now named after him. The ‘kid from Brooklyn’, as Geffen has called himself, is a self-confessed ‘arts junkie’. Having split from DreamWorks in 2008, he has cemented his reputation for generosity.

In the hunt for new revenue streams as a hedge against the decline in government funding, the Van Gogh Museum has started offering its professional services to private collectors, and business, ranging from conservation to installation, museum management and educational programmesIn the hunt for new revenue streams as a hedge against the decline in government funding, the Van Gogh Museum has started offering its professional services to private collectors, and business, ranging from conservation to installation, museum management and educational programmes

With an estimated fortune at less than half that of Blavatnik, Geffen continues to spread largesse across the arts in America. Having established the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Spelman and Morehouse College arts education programmes; the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the Geffen Playhouse, his gift to MoMA is unrestricted, meaning it can be directed at the museum’s discretion. With no dependents, a fortune estimated at $6.8bn, and an art collection valued at over $2bn, Geffen has suggested his substantial donations to the arts will continue. In California today, his generosity is now matched by Eli Broad.

Almost anything you can say about Los Angeles is true. It’s large, it’s a mess, it’s alive, it’s vulgar, and it’s beautiful. More than any other city, LA represents the fulfilment of the American Dream, of wealth, speed, freedom, and mobility; its most defining characteristic.

As Angelenos charge around the ramps and curves of the freeway intersections, they know that this is the place to be. Shrouded beneath the famous blanket of acrid and corroding smog, at times the most uncivilised, and at times the most seductive of cities, nothing can prepare you for it, the dream factory of the world. Everything is endless. Everything about it goes on and on, yet it is not a place that anyone who cares about art and architecture and design can turn their back on.

At the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5mAt the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5m Image Credit: AL_A

LA considers itself one of the world’s great cities. On a clear day, and they are getting fewer, it does not need statistics to prove it.

A mail-order city in a department-store state, with a special brand of sunshine, novelist Raymond Chandler called it a place where ‘everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else’. That is no longer the case.

Where once a private pool epitomised wealth, today it is private art. And no one epitomises that more than Eli Broad. Genius or despot, the power broker gazillionaire philanthropist wields an influence across the city in a way unparalleled elsewhere, even in the USA.

Life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Eli Broad now has his own museum across Grand Avenue from MoCA. The Broad is a monument to a private collector in the manner of Henry Frick, and JP Morgan in New York, and Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, all of whom were determined to fix history’s view of them as enlightened powerbrokers of their day and benefactors to the future.

Assiduous collectors of contemporary art for more than 50 years, Edythe and Eli Broad now have a $140m three-storey home for their art that, after a series of construction setbacks, finally opened in 2015. A $20m lawsuit against the manufacturer of the honeycomb-facade caused one of many delays. Diller Scofido + Renfro’s design works as a sharp counterpoint to its exuberant next-door neighbour, the 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry, for which Broad inevitably led the fundraising.

More than 50 years ago Dorothy Chandler (no relation) envisaged a cultural acropolis for this stretch of hilltop LA with corporate monuments stretching along where once there stood hundreds of 19th-century houses. What she dreamed of Broad has worked and spent hard to create, in yet another bid to transform downtown Los Angeles.

At the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5mAt the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5m Image Credit: AL_A

To create a cultural centre for a spread out city is no easy thing. To do it in an area known as Bunker Hill along a desolate street that is too wide, with sidewalks that are too narrow, an expensive car park, no trees, little street lighting and hardly any signs, is a push. Restaurants are few. A metro station would help – the nearest is a 15-minute walk away. Diverse activity there is not. You would not select a postcard of it to send home.

Broad is determined to make cultural activity possible. The museum’s sidewalks are being widened, pedestrian crossings are being built, a grassy public square has been designed, and eventually there will be concerts in the streets and movies on that piazza. Cross promotions and collaboration between the venues are planned.

Meanwhile, last year Elaine Wynn pledged $50m to start the next phase of the Peter Zumthor building designed to house the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Co-chair of the museum’s board, she was joined by fellow billionaire A Jerrold Perenchio, who added $25m to his original gift of 47 paintings worth an estimated $500m. Taken together these two gifts are the largest single one to a cultural institution in the city. In total, $475m of private support will go towards the project that will see four of the current seven buildings replaced by 2023.

Zumthor’s 37,000 sq m scheme along ‘Museum Row’ features galleries in six separate trapezoidal sections, set within a sinuous, raised, curvilinear glass and grey concrete slab perched on glass cylinders 10m above ground, bridging Wilshire Boulevard to touch down in what is currently a car park. Its form resembles a calligraphic brush stroke.

In its ambition it has been compared to the Getty Center that has commanded a hillside here since 1997 – and some of Zumthor’s peers have costed his pharaonically expensive project frighteningly close to the $1bn-plus mark. ‘Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,’ said Andy Warhol. ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’

At the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5mAt the V&A the new entrance on Exhibition Road will be called Blavatnik Hall after Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, a supporter of the arts of long standing, who donated £5m. Image Credit: AL_A

The American Dream? ‘Go west, young man, go forth in the Country’ exhorted Horace Greeley, the Republican leader, turning a phrase picked up from an Indiana newspaper into a national rallying cry. Gone west came to mean something entirely different. A five minute drive from The Broad, MOCA Grand and the Walt Disney Concert Hall is a zone of failed humanity: Skid Row, a concentration of desperate poverty unlike any other in the developed world, and one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the USA. It is the greatest obstacle to the rebuilding of a first-class downtown in Los Angeles that Eli Broad dreams about.

In the Seventies, the centralisation of this famously decentralised city was filled with shelters, soup kitchens and rescue missions for the truly impoverished. It still is. One wrong turn out of The Broad and you can find yourself in another world, where encampments of drug addicts and the mentally ill spill out on to the sidewalk for block after block after block of tents and flimsy box shelters. It is somewhere below the bottom of everything you can imagine, it is shockingly stark, indescribable poverty alongside unimaginable wealth.

This undercity looks up and sees the architects of philanthropic culture skating across its cardboard ceiling to their next great project, to erect one more monument to themselves. Hooray for Hollywood!








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