New Broad Museum brings Big Art to campus

Bite - Hand - Feed

First let me say that I am always grateful whenever privileged members of the 1% deign to throw tens of millions into a community art project instead of funding a new PAC dedicated to giving themselves yet another big tax break. By that standard alone, the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum on the Michigan State University campus is a rip-roaring $40-million-plus success.

We should also applaud the decision to commission Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid to design the silvery edifice that critics and supporters alike now refer to as an alien spacecraft. As a card-carrying member of the National Organization for Women, I will always support a talented woman, especially one in such a notoriously male-dominated field. Hadid has created an impressive body of work, though the MSU project is rarely mentioned and never as a standout.

But I suspect that I speak for at least a few in arguing that the project suffers from three concerns (two minor and one major): Bad Zoning, Bad Ductwork and the drawbacks of Big Art.

Bad Zoning

Much of the ink publisher Berl Schwartz and writer Larry Cosentino lavished on the new museum in the special issue of City Pulse is spent on unquestioning boosterism, which includes justifying the decision to land our new UFO on the corner of Grand River and Collingwood. The general tone of the Pulse coverage is that anyone who questions the brilliance of any of the choices related to the project is either a bumpkin or a philistine.

Yet even my local township officials know better than to allow someone to plop a shiny metal-clad trailer into the middle of a neighborhood of historic brick homes.

Hadid’s exotic building is no trailer, of course, but why not give the building room to soar? This isn’t New York, where every square foot of real estate comes at such a premium that diverse buildings must be squished together.

No one wallpapers the walls of an art museum, because the overarching purpose is to provide a neutral backdrop that showcases the art. So why shoehorn an architectural gem onto a tiny lot sandwiched between a busy commercial thoroughfare and some of the least appealing buildings on campus?

The museum deserves to be planted in the middle of a windswept field where it can be inhaled one breath. Or maybe nestled alongside the banks of the Red Cedar, where its reflective skin could re-project the river’s rushing waters in the spring.

But place it across the street from Five Guys’ Burgers and Fries? Really?

The siting of the facility appears to be have been solely Eli Broad’s call, though I admit I could not plow through all of Cosentino’s fawning, New Yorker-length coverage of the process to make sure. This suggests economics and ego rather than aesthetics carried the day.

At a practical level, if the predictions about the facility drawing 150,000 visitors a year proves true, please also tell me where will people park.

And as long as I am burning bridges, let me embrace my inner churl and say that the City Pulse’s special museum issue disappoints. The package suffers from the publication’s all-too-common flaws - achingly bad design, layouts and pagination and the failure to prune Cosentino’s copy so that it doesn’t bog down into faux-literary meeting minutes.

How Lincoln freed the slaves deserves exhaustive treatment. But I really don’t give a damn that New York Times architecture critic Joseph Giovanni didn’t know PowerPoint before he visited.

Bad Ductwork

You would think that investing millions of dollars would ensure perfection all the way down to the tiniest bolt. But the project was delayed from its original opening date of April 21 to now because the interlocking stainless-steel-and-molybdenum-pleats and glass plates initially shipped to the site did not meet tolerances and therefore did not click solidly together.

While that problem has been solved, if you get close you discover that the seams in the metal don’t always line up. In some places, they do. In others, they don’t. Symmetrical or random - one way or the other would have been better than both on the same wall.

There are also many places where the surface of the metal skin appears mottled and streaked. For the past few months, I have walked by the building each Wednesday on my way to teach my freshman seminar in the Natural Sciences Building. As the museum finally reached completion, I watched a workman in a cherry picker patiently try to clean the silvery surface of the building by hand to little avail.

So after spending $40 million, it comes down to a bottle of Windex and a rag? Really? And how will that work in the winter?

Big Art = $afe Art

But the biggest concern is the museum’s cramped and constricted vision. While I have not yet toured the facility, my online exploration of the opening exhibits makes it clear there’s no Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Robert (NSFW) Mapplethorpe’s “Self-Portrait (with Bullwhip)” to unnerve the visitors.

Too safe. Too tame. Too expensive.

I actually wish that the young Edythe Broad had been put in charge of selecting the exhibits for the opening. She might have done something exciting. The Los Angeles Times reprised an anecdote from Broad’s book The Art of Being Unreasonable that suggests she’s the one who understands art should be judged by its ability to provoke more than the size of its pricetag:

“Edye had wanted to buy a Warhol soup can print in the 1960s for $100 but didn’t for fear I would think she was nuts — which I probably would have,” he writes. By the time he’d had his light-bulb moment and begun to appreciate the pop art master, the price had gone up a bit — Broad paid $11.7 million at auction for Warhol’s “Small Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot).” When the gavel came down, he reports, “I had bid so discreetly that [Edythe] didn’t realize I was the winner … she whispered in my ear, ‘What idiot paid that much?'”

The old Kresge Museum offered comforting, well-worn memes and themes. Wasn’t the new Broad supposed to shock and unnerve us? Naim June Paik’s riff on video was provocative in 1973, but now? Really?

The New York Times offers a mini-review of L.A. artist Fritz Haeg’s “Domestic Integrities,” a fiber rug crocheted from discarded fabric by area volunteers that will be dotted with “squash, herbs and corn husks” from the MSU Student Organic Farm. The article quotes the artist explaining, “It’s a project that questions how we occupy the land.”

I am passionate about persuading people that we must abandon industrial agriculture if we are to feed the world. But this exhibit merely reinforces the pretentiously Portlandian vision that buying local produce is all it takes to save the planet.

The Gift: Lansing, Michigan, by Jochen Gerz is simply an assemblage of mug shots of visitors and others connected to the project. Narcissism aggregated and illuminated? How is that edgy?

The most provocative offering may be Marjetica Potrc’s Soweto House with Prepaid Water Meter. But visitors need to know about the ravaging effects of the commodification of water worldwide to appreciate the implications.

(click here to watch the full video)

Art that matters requires danger, not just daring. This short film below is part of a longer work on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and his refusal to back down from challenging the Chinese government. Ai, famous in the West for helping to design the famous Bird’s Nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics, is shown here creating an installation of almost 5,000 backpacks that represent the nameless school children killed when their shoddily built schools collapsed during a recent earthquake. Filmmaker Allison Klayman documents the beating that the artist endured at the hands of local police as a result. This is art that truly matters.

Watch Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei? on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Modern Art of the kind showcased in the Broad Museum is more about investment than authenticity. As yesterday’s Modern Art becomes today’s Big Art, the emphasis on commerce over conviction should come as no surprise.

As I watched the sleek limo roll up in front of the museum on opening night, I remembered this news release that stresses the estimated $5.75 million the museum will reportedly pump into the regional economy each year. That far more than any insights or inspiration is the actual measure of what the museum is intended to do.

So while the $150-a-ticket patrons at the opening reception search for meaning among the prestigious but predictable installations, I will instead be watching this 60-second video on YouTube. Over and over. For free.