The LACMA Social Set

Michael Govan (b. 1963) runs the kind of world where a man can fly his own small plane, spot an abandoned Nabisco factory from the air, and turn it into a museum. He did that at Dia:Beacon. He keeps a 1979 Beechcraft Bonanza at the Santa Monica airport and has held a pilot’s license since 1995. He earned close to two million dollars in 2024, which makes him the highest-paid museum director in the country. He hangs, by one Washington Post headline, with Leo and Kanye, and he once paid ten million for a rock. The rock is Michael Heizer’s (b. 1944) Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder he hauled a hundred miles to Wilshire Boulevard with a street party at the end. This is the set. The museum director sits at its center, and around him gather the trustees, the collectors, the star architects, the land artists, and the movie people who want to stand near all of it.
The lineage runs through Thomas Krens (b. 1946), the Williams College mentor who took Govan to the Guggenheim at twenty-five and built Bilbao. Krens taught the model the set still lives by: the museum as global brand, the building as the masterpiece, the director as impresario. Govan carried it to Los Angeles in 2006, after ten other people turned the LACMA job down, and spent twenty years pursuing the Peter Zumthor (b. 1943) building that opens this April as the David Geffen Galleries. Frank Gehry (b. 1929), Renzo Piano (b. 1937), Zumthor, these are the names the set reveres, the architects whose signatures convert a county museum into a destination. James Turrell (b. 1943) and Heizer supply the other pole, the artists who carve light and earth out in the desert on a scale no gallery can hold, and Govan lobbied Washington to wrap a national monument around Heizer’s City.
What do these people value? Scale and permanence, first. The set does not want a good show. It wants a building that will outlast the man who raised the money for it, a thing future generations cannot ignore. They value the transformation story, the before-and-after, the dead factory reborn, the sleepy county museum turned into the fourth most Instagrammed in the world. They value the company of artists, and the director who can call Turrell or Heizer a friend ranks above the administrator who only manages a collection. They value taste rendered as vision, the capacity to see in 2003 what a town will become in 2020. And they value money, though they speak of it as stewardship, because the whole apparatus runs on the gifts of the very rich, and the director’s first art is the art of the ask.
The hero is the visionary builder. Not the curator who knows the most about Magritte, and not the bureaucrat who balances the budget, but the man who imagines a thing that does not exist and wills it into concrete. Govan tells this story about himself with relish. He recalls staring into the La Brea Tar Pits and thinking of the Chauvet cave paintings, the origins of human creativity, and deciding the spot was a good place to smash the Cartesian grid. The hero speaks like this. He reaches for Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) and decolonization and unconscious memory to explain a building, because the heroic act must be framed as more than construction. It must be framed as a break with history. The set rewards the man who can make a museum sound like a cosmology.
The status games run on a few moves. The signature building is the largest chip, and a director who lands a Gehry or a Zumthor has played at the highest table. The acquisition is another, the donated masterpiece, the doubled collection, the rock that becomes a pilgrimage site. The artist friendship is its own currency, photographed and circulated, because proximity to a living genius confers a glow that no MBA can. Then there is the donor, the trustee whose name goes on the wall, and the courtship of that donor is a status game played on both sides, the rich man buying immortality and the director granting it. Brad Pitt (b. 1963) once stood up at a county supervisors meeting to praise Zumthor’s mastery of light and shadow, and spoke so long an official told him to wrap it up. That moment is the set in miniature, glamour lending itself to architecture, everyone borrowing shine from everyone else.
Now the shoulds. The set holds that great art demands great spending and that a city deserves a monument worthy of its ambitions. They hold that the old museum was a colonial instrument, the encyclopedic grid a tool of conquest, and that the new museum should break the timeline, dissolve the departments, and let the visitor wander a park of his own making. Govan says he told Zumthor he did not want anyone in the front, that the building should avoid linear histories. This reads as humility and democracy. It also lets a director discard the scholarly departments that might check him and concentrate the vision in one set of hands. They hold that access and attendance prove virtue, that 1.6 million visitors and a top Instagram ranking justify the project against its critics. And when the workers move to unionize, as the LACMA staff did this past fall, the set holds that the matter should go to a formal vote rather than voluntary recognition, which is the moment the language of community meets the reality of who signs the checks.
The essentialist claims sit at the bottom. The set believes that vision is a gift, that some men simply see what others cannot, and that this sight licenses them to override the curators, the critics, and the donors who object. Govan’s career is the argument. The boy who won an art contest, whose portfolio an art teacher noticed at Sidwell Friends, who served as acting curator as an undergraduate, becomes the man entitled to smash the grid because the gift was there from the start. They believe in the artist as a higher kind of person, the maker of City and Roden Crater as a figure touched by something close to the sacred, which is why the director seeks to stand beside him. They believe great art is universal and timeless, that a cave painting and a Picasso speak the same tongue across thirty-five thousand years, and this faith makes the global, departmentless, ocean-themed museum feel like a return to human truth rather than a curatorial gamble. And they believe, quietly, that their own taste is not opinion but perception, that they do not prefer the Zumthor building, they see that it is right, while the critics who call it a concrete blob or a freeway overpass simply lack the eyes. The comfort of the set is the comfort of the visionary. The building costs more than promised, holds less art than before, loses its largest donor, and drives its architect to swear off the country, and still the director can stand inside it and feel that he was the one who saw.