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.
We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.
All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:
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