Last week, when news broke that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was shutting down its film program temporarily to “rethink” how to make it more profitable, some of the more interesting responses suggested that we should be skeptical that the program will come back in any significant form at all. “Don’t believe for a moment that this hiatus is designed to refresh and strengthen film at LACMA,” wrote Richard Schickel in an LA Times piece, in which he also came this close to accusing LACMA director Michael Govan of not having heard of the French New Wave. Also at the LAT, in a piece widely praised for its vitriol, critic Kenneth Turan railed against the “half-baked hiatus”: “You’ll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that ‘we had to burn the village to save it.’ That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation’s pros and cons while things are up and running doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.”

That decision seems to lie with Govan, and Schickel’s not the only one calling into question his credentials as an arbiter of film curation. In an interview with Govan and demoted film programmer Ian Birnie for LA Weekly, Tom Christie subtly implied that, with his suit and tie and talk of Jeff Koons, Govan’s agenda is hopelessly corporate art — not exactly the kind of worldview that befits a world class museum film program, according to Anne Thompson. “I loved the programming, but it was arcane and eclectic, as a museum’s should be, not designed to ‘build an audience.’”

What’s interesting is that, even in the wake of all this criticism, LACMA is actually encouraging further feedback. They’ve set up a forum where concerned parties can ask questions and/or rant about the rumored changes, and Govan will allegedly read and respond. So far, I couldn’t see any sign of him, although LACMA communications director Allison Agsten seems to be very active. So: is this an honest attempt at dialogue on LACMA’s part, or are they just paying lipservice to a community too small to have a real impact on the institution’s bottom line? That remains to be seen.