The housing search for chief of Getty Museum

At the Jan. 6 roundtable discussion at The Times with other Los Angeles-area arts leaders, you raised the issue of how The Times might cover the arts in the future. Unfortunately, your Feb. 15 front-page article, “Housing Search Is Expensive for Getty,” seems to at least partially answer your own question.

Since starting work as director of the J. Paul Getty Museum on Jan. 2, I have not been asked a single question by your newspaper about the museum’s acquisition, exhibition or educational programs. I have, however, been asked how much I earn and what sort of car I drive; one of your reporters also telephoned the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to ask how many bedrooms are in the director’s residence I occupied in Richmond with my family. This must be the first time the number of bathrooms in a three-bedroom rental property temporarily occupied by a museum director has appeared on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper.

Despite this, and the “shock and awe” of Westside Los Angeles housing prices, I am very pleased to be working in this great cultural city at a time when all of our art museums can really make a difference to how art is produced and experienced.

MICHAEL BRAND

Director

J. Paul Getty Museum

Brentwood

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The Times is missing a key part of the reporting on the house for the Getty director. It should be mentioned that the prices quoted, while high, are not above average for the areas in which the houses in question are located.

It is reasonable that this institution should provide a residence for its director that is spacious enough to accommodate museum functions and close enough to the main facility to have a viable connection to it.

The museum has just hired, in Michael Brand, a capable and erudite director equal to the formidable tasks facing the institution. To attract and retain people of such caliber, the Getty obviously needs to provide an appropriate house. Reporting such as this, without reference to current comparative values, confuses this issue with unrelated problems.

Perhaps the great lost opportunity in this situation is that the Getty, for this residence and other functions, could be purchasing and preserving something sorely in need of protection: namely, significant 20th century Los Angeles residential architecture, much of which is being remodeled out of existence on the Westside. Not even Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) (an authority on nonprofit governance) could argue with the “public good” inherent to such acquisitions.

M. BRIAN TICHENOR

Architect, Westwood

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The real question is: Is there intelligent life at the Getty? The decline and fall of the ancient civilizations immortalized in the museum’s collections seems to be in the process of being repeated at the travertine-encrusted empire on the hill in Brentwood. What a shame. Or should I say sham?

JENNIFER LAITY

Palos Verdes Estates