A museum has lost its muses

Where, oh where have LACMA’s curators gone?

I know they exist; I’ve seen their names and even met a few. There are 30 in all, but you’ll have to dig deep in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s summer exhibitions to find them.

Much has been made of their displacement in regard to the King Tut extravaganza, which was organized not by LACMA curators but by Egypt’s chief antiquities official, with support in the U.S. from the world’s second-largest rock concert promoter (AEG) and a for-profit exhibition production company (Arts and Exhibitions International) run by a former Clear Channel executive whose other recent projects involved the conspicuous globetrotting of treasures from the Vatican, the Titanic and Princess Diana’s closet.

LACMA’s flirtation with corporate production is lamentable in relation to Tut. More distressing, however, is the fact that many of the same problems also plague “Japan Goes to the World’s Fairs: Japanese Art at the Great Expositions in Europe and the United States, 1867-1904,” a comparatively low-profile exhibition that doesn’t involve extraordinarily precious artifacts and isn’t likely to draw record-breaking crowds -- suggesting that LACMA’s problem goes deeper than the necessary indulgence of an occasional blockbuster.

I went into the show with high expectations. The subject -- Japan’s emergence and cultural promotion of itself in the West after 250 years of feudal isolationism -- is a fascinating one and rich enough, undoubtedly, for multiple exhibitions. The museum, furthermore, has an admirable track record in Asian art. The press release was promisingly substantial, and the title had a studious yet romantic, even adventurous, ring to it.

The exhibition itself, however, is a bit of a mess: loosely assembled, logistically confusing, artistically uneven and, despite a few decent explanatory passages, disappointingly short on contextual information. The latter is especially unfortunate when context is precisely what the show purports to explore; the subtitle isn’t just “Japanese Art,” but “Japanese Art at the Great Expositions.”

The roughly 150 objects on display -- nearly all of which did appear in various world’s fairs -- give viewers a sense of how Japan saw fit to promote itself, and the explanatory texts do a fair job of outlining how the interests of this promotion came to condition the production of the objects: encouraging large and very elaborate pieces, for instance, or blurring traditional stylistic distinctions.

One leaves the show, however, with little sense of what these expositions were like and thus of how the Japanese presence came across within them. How were the fairs laid out? Where were the Japanese pavilions situated? What did they look like? How were the works arranged? Who attended? What was the response? In the absence of this sort of material context, the objects are just objects -- they don’t necessarily speak for themselves. A few vintage photographs would have done wonders to bring this historical moment alive.

(There is a catalog, due out in mid-July, that may address some of these questions. I regret that deadline constraints prevented me from including it in my consideration of the show, though I can’t help but wonder whether the delay is symptomatic of the show’s general disorganization.)

As for the objects themselves, many are quite beautiful, and the craftsmanship is exceptional throughout. That may be the show’s one defining through-line. Whether the medium be paint, clay, lacquer, ivory or bronze, the objects were made with a degree of care and skill unparalleled in the modern West.

That said, many of the works are otherwise unremarkable, and some are even a little corny (particularly in the latter half of the period, when Western tastes began to filter into the Japanese sensibility). Some are quite old; others were churned out in the months prior to a particular exposition. The show divides the works by exposition (Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.), with two or three of them assigned to each landing along the spiraling floor plan of LACMA’s own Japanese pavilion, but draws few distinctions in regard to quality or context. Within the space of each landing, the objects mingle indiscriminately, leaving one the impression of wandering through a curio shop.

Part of the problem is the building itself. It’s a pleasant space to walk through -- quiet, peaceful and soothing -- but less than ideal for this sort of exhibition. The landings are small and extremely limited in their configuration. Because of the layout, many objects are set at several feet’s distance from the viewer, with a banister and a moat-like gap in between, limiting one’s ability to really engage with them, particularly smaller and more intricate ones. Because there is so little wall space, all of the show’s textual information is printed on loose, place mat-size laminated cards, which the viewer is obliged to balance on the edge of the banister.

Many of these issues could have been resolved with a little curatorial determination, but judging from the exhibition’s press release, there may have been too many cooks in the kitchen.

“This exhibition was organized,” it reads, “by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tokyo National Museum, the Japan Association for the 2005 World Exposition, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), and the NHK Promotions Co., Ltd., with the curatorial assistance of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art and the Nagoya City Museum.” (And sponsored, incidentally, by Panasonic, Toyota, Sompo Japan Insurance, Japan Airlines, TV Japan, the consulate general of Japan and the Japan Foundation.)

Indeed, too many cooks may be a generous assessment: When one of those cooks is a TV station and another an association that is organizing the modern-day equivalent of the show’s historical subject (the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan), one has to be suspicious.

Would that this were an exception. A review of LACMA’s press releases indicates that not one of the museum’s major current exhibitions was organized solely by its own curators: Half (“Andre Kertesz,” “Tim Hawkinson” and “Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape”) were collaborations with other museums, the other half (“Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” this exhibition, and “Renzo Piano and Building Workshop: Selected Projects”) with non-museum or for-profit entities.

Even setting aside ethical questions, where’s the vision? Where’s the backbone? The largest encyclopedic art museum west of the Mississippi should be a force in its own right -- an example, not a sidekick. The museum has produced great shows in the past and surely will in the future, but a great show here and there isn’t enough. These smaller, more focused exhibitions are equally important in that they offer the curators a space in which to shine and thus showcase the intelligence of the entire institution.

*

‘Japan Goes to the World’s Fairs’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.,

Los Angeles

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org