OLD NEWS

THE MAN, THE METROPOLIS, AND THE $720 MILLION MUSEUM
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It is a sunny 75-degree day in mid-January and Michael Govan, the CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is walking through a domed underpass at his brand-new building, the 347,500-square-foot David Geffen Galleries.
“It’s an awesome responsibility to build a metropolitan-scale museum in the image of the 21st century,” he says. “Maybe in the 22nd century, it’ll be like, ‘Oh, that was kind of 21st century.’ ”
Perhaps the future is rosier to think about than the present. It is months before the public will set foot in the place, and the jury is still out on what all the fuss is about. Govan has spent all of his two decades as director trying to build a new structure that can house the biggest art collection west of the Mississippi. It was supposed to cost $650 million, but missed deadlines and overruns caused the budget to balloon to $720 million.
The press was brutal. A local critic won a Pulitzer for a series of LA Times columns excoriating the vision and picking apart the follow-through. The public was bankrolling much of it via a Board of Supervisors decree to move taxpayer funds to the museum but reacted to the design with a shrug at best—plenty thought the undulated single-floor space looked like an amoeba oozing over Wilshire. It couldn’t help that the architect Govan chose without a nominating contest was Peter Zumthor, who had never designed a building in America.
In 2025, staff departures included the CFO and the COO. A few years earlier, billionaire Tom Gores—who owns a company that charges for phone calls made from prisons, and faced accusations of price gouging—resigned his position on the board when activist groups spoke up. After voicing their concerns, the Ahmanson Foundation decided to pull all future gifts to the museum despite donating more than $130 million worth of art to LACMA over the years.
“It’s my understanding that LACMA is changing from an encyclopedic museum with a robust permanent collection to a museum with some permanent collection works on view and more temporary exhibitions,” William Ahmanson told The New York Times in 2020. “The concern is that the carefully curated collection we’ve amassed over decades may never see the light of day again.”
Govan’s a museum savant—if anyone could overcome the odds, it was him. He was basically running the Williams College Museum of Art in his teens, helped the Guggenheim launch Frank Gehry’s Bilbao building that shocked the world, and turned postindustrial husks into art meccas at Mass MoCA and Dia Beacon. But in Tinseltown, Govan was fighting against the tide. Los Angeles is the nation’s second biggest city, but art museums in Washington, DC; Chicago; Boston; Houston; and San Francisco all regularly rack up more visitors than his fiefdom on Wilshire. Hollywood creates silver screen narratives adored by the world, but its institution for visual art was getting lapped by smaller cities.
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And so he dreamed up one of the largest public cultural spaces in Los Angeles, one that lets the landscape in and never lets the visitor forget that this museum is in this city. Even the Pritzker Prize winner Zumthor had his doubts. He could never imagine how the building would fit inside the limits of the La Brea Tar Pits, or how it would vault itself over Wilshire Boulevard. Once while Govan was visiting the atelier, Zumthor took his arm and wiped an entire schematic to the floor in a fit of utter frustration. But again and again, Govan repeated to him, “This will be a masterpiece.”
“This museum lets LA be present—the landscape and the ­houses and everything, Beverly Hills, the whole thing, is also present,” Zumthor tells me. “So, they interact together. We thought it’s a beautiful idea. You experience this art, which comes from the whole world, in LA and not in a box.”
And now the David Geffen Galleries, so named for the $150 million gift from the billionaire philanthropist, is here, and Govan is ready to defend it wholesale. Just its physical presence is something of a justification. Actually walking through it with him, the imposing concrete seemingly carved out of a mountain, is a touch surreal.
And that is before he tells me it moves—as in the entire gigantic museum is built on base isolators that allow it to swing five feet in any direction. If it can’t move, it can’t absorb the earthquakes that will inevitably rock this weather-beaten city into the perilous decades of climate change to come. It’s as heavy as an NFL stadium, or the combined weight of every palm tree in Los Angeles. It already looks like it’s been there forever, some gnomic ruin from prehistoric La-La Land newly dredged up from the bottom of the tar pits—and yet it’s a museum so Mariana Trench–proof it could, as Govan implies, last for centuries.
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“There’s this idea that you’re kind of making an investment,” he says. “What Peter and I did—we wanted it to feel, like, a little bit ancient, like it had been here a long time. And with the seismic engineering, maybe it will be the oldest building in LA at some point—because over time, you never know.”
When LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries open to the public next month, it will mark the completion of one of the country’s most ambitious cultural projects in its history. There will be galas, dinners, concerts, and a ribbon cutting with all the local political bigwigs. The galleries will be in on the bash too—Jeffrey Deitch’s Hollywood gallery will contain an iconic modern sculpture, Charles Ray’s 46-foot-long painted aluminum Firetruck, for the first time since it was on view in front of LACMA 18 years ago. The museum’s incredible holdings—Rembrandts, Impressionist treasures, thousands of pre-Columbian wonders—will be on view again after years in storage or on loan. Even in a city that hosts globally important awards shows nearly every weekend in the winter, the April opening is going to stand out.
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The county will be very involved—and it better be, as it appropriated $125 million of taxpayer money to the project. Happily.
“What better place than LA, where dreams are made and come true, that through this public-private partnership we were able to pull it off,” says Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who represents the Second District of Los Angeles County and is a deeply influential figure in local politics. “Between LACMA, between Disney Concert Hall, between the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, LA County has a rich history of being directly involved in the construction of cultural venues.”
But in some ways Govan views the spread on Wilshire as something more than just a big new place to see art in LA. He’s spent his life making museums—what if he could make something that’s more than a museum? What if it could be the anchor presence of a...multi-tendriled 21st-century global soft-power entity?
Over the last decade, I’ve watched Govan work the art world room by room, continent by continent, in his quest to make the museum into one of the world’s powerhouse art platforms. He’s that rarest of breeds, an institutional administrator who actually went to art school to train as an artist—and he’s a wickedly talented networker, a one-man LACMA cheerleader in a natty suit fully at ease at—to use two late-2025 scenes where we were both present—a dinner at Maxim’s in Paris hosted by Miuccia Prada or a cocktail party for the LACMA young donors circle at Art Basel Miami Beach. He can fundraise like nobody else, soliciting eye-watering chunks of change from the world’s wealthiest cultural benefactors: Geffen gave $150 million; Elaine Wynn gave $50 million. In February he was in Doha for the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, alongside Sheikha al-Mayassa, whom Govan’s been working with since a partnership was announced in 2019—“They’re big partners and friends,” he tells me—and is constantly in Las Vegas to check on the city’s first dedicated contemporary art museum, which LACMA is supporting through a share of its collection.
He’s also made some monumental entreaties to Asia, most significantly through a partnership with the Yuz Museum. For years LACMA threw an over-the-top bash during Art Basel Hong Kong, including one on a three-story 260-foot boat called Jumbo Kingdom that featured cinematic licentiousness on each floor. I was there perilously on board that gigantic floating restaurant, watching as a single West Coast museum put its firm stamp on Hong Kong. “Can a party change the world?” asked Tatler.
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Speaking of parties changing the world: The first major event held at LACMA’s new addition will be the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, Hollywood’s biggest celebration of the year relocating to the museum’s grounds. Govan, ever the showman, giddily swings me under concrete cathedrals where the main nave of the event will be, into a glass-walled convex orb where the traditional post-Oscars In-N-Out burgers will be served.
“We can do outdoor movies, concerts, we’ll do an art festival here—the Calder sculpture’s going to be over there under those lights, with the jets of water,” Govan says, his fingers pointing this way and that, up and down, walking around this insane museum yet to be seen by Angelenos. “Shio Kusaka has a spaceship, a flying saucer that’s beyond the education space. So the idea is it’s a garden of follies.”
He points to the light shining down on the letters affixed to the rim of the building, spelling out “DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES” and casting big shadows on the floor. The ever-present sun setting in cloudless LA makes the giant shadow letters as constant as the Pacific Ocean tides—suddenly, $150 million doesn’t seem like too much to pay.
“I sent David a picture of that,” Govan says.
In terms the local industry can get behind, LACMA isn’t the MacGuffin, it’s the main character. Zumthor’s addition has been held up as the raison d’être for the town’s expanded gallery network that saw outposts from David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Marian Goodman open since the pandemic. It’s been tracked by the culture department of the Los Angeles Times as a permanent beat, with special attention paid to the ballooning costs. It’s been a veritable punching bag for the literati of Los Angeles, with the Times’s Christopher Knight scoring a Pulitzer Prize for “work demonstrating extraordinary community service by a critic, applying his expertise and enterprise to critique a proposed overhaul of the L.A. County Museum of Art.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joseph Giovannini called the design an “amoebic pancake” and came up with a supersubtle headline for a series of articles about the new LACMA: “SUICIDE BY ARCHITECTURE.”
For a town that snaps open the trades every morning to read reviews, well, the reviews weren’t great.
“The blob that ate Wilshire Boulevard,” wrote the Architectural Record.
“The Incredible Shrinking Museum,” wrote Knight in the Times.
“Where once we had sci-fi, now we have an agreeable cream-colored concrete structure that in at least one schematic (the northward-facing view from Wilshire) bears the profile of a small-city airport terminal,” wrote Carolina Miranda, also in the Times.
“The clunky, amoebalike building cannot seem to decide between the digitally derived expressionism of such architects as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, and Zumthor’s own brand of minimalist modernism. We’re left with a museum that benefits nobody,” wrote Kate Wagner in The New Republic.
Much of the controversy over Zumthor’s radical design concerns the demolition of several original structures. Years before the building even took shape, the dialogue scripted a narrative where those suggesting teardowns were inflicting some cancer upon the urban landscape. But those unfamiliar with Govan don’t fully understand that he’s done that sort of thing already. In his 20s, he helped Thomas Krens convert a former textile mill in North Adams, Massachusetts, into what eventually became Mass MoCA in 1999. When he was just 35, he was flying a small rented plane—yes, Govan can fly airplanes and personally takes board members in LA to see the land art in New Mexico—up the Hudson River, when he saw a large structure just outside the town of Beacon, New York. It was once a Nabisco factory. Midair, Govan dreamed up a temple to minimalism called Dia Beacon.
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So he’s built museums before. What he’s been working toward with LACMA the last two decades is something way more ambitious, Fitzcarraldo-esque, even. He’s building the world’s last encyclopedic museum and intends it to last for centuries.
“When the question came up about this place, it was, did the world need a reconsidered whole art history? And you have to think it’s a rare thing,” Govan tells me as we make our way upstairs to the glass-walled atria where art will soon be installed. “The only places that have encyclopedic museums are in the United States. In the 19th century they assembled old buildings in Paris and London and other places, in Berlin. But this animal, it’s a weird American thing. And there won’t be any more. And there are none you can tear down. The only one you could reshape was LA. So it was a once in a—not in a lifetime, it was a once-in-a-world-history opportunity, to be fair.”
The relentless pearl clutching—the pulled loans, the Pulitzer for architectural philistinism, the unceasing drumbeat of doomsayers—missed the most controversial aspect of the project. Govan, through sheer force of will, has decided to rip up the entire idea of what a museum can be.
“All of us academically and in curatorial practice were like, ‘Yeah, we love museums, museums are cool.’ But all those museums were formed in a 19th-century image, and it’s been a few years,” he says. “So what the world really needs is a reconsidered encyclopedic museum. And I knew what it was. It was no hierarchies among cultures. It wasn’t a Greco-Roman pediment over a temple—it looked like LA. And so this idea of no hierarchies—that was the idea. I was like, oh my God, we could do that now.”
The legacy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, relative to its peers, is short. It was only established in the early 1960s, and when it first opened, was the largest new art museum built in the US after the National Gallery of Art. William Randolph Hearst was an early supporter, and the initial loans trickled in from J. Paul Getty, before he decided to open a museum next to his house in Pacific Palisades, now the Getty Villa. By the 1990s the museum was fighting for relevance even within its own city, as the artist-founded MOCA, cofunded by mega-philanthropist Eli Broad, scored a series of hits with shows such as “Helter Skelter,” a survey of California artists that was instantly star-making, and in the decades that followed, utterly canonical.
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In the ’90s, director Andrea Rich tried to recruit a then 33-year-old Govan, newly installed at the top perch at Dia, to join the museum, but he rebuffed the offer. He wasn’t sure that Los Angeles was a town for ambitious artists, the types of people who could support a thriving art ecosystem. He recalled what the artist John Baldessari said to his students around the time Govan was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, a decade earlier: After graduating from one of LA’s much-ballyhooed elite art schools, it was time to leave for a place where art was actually appreciated, namely New York.
By the time Govan was recruited to come to LACMA in the early 2000s, he’d checked back with Baldessari. The artist had changed his tune. Los Angeles, he had decided, was a place where artists could actually live.
“Yeah, he told them to stay—he always told them to go to New York, and he would say this and then there was a moment where he said, ‘No, no, no, no, just stay,’ ” Govan recalls. “ ‘You don’t have to go to New York.’ ”
And so Govan arrived in Los Angeles. As a brash East Coast transplant, he brought with him bona fides in iconoclastic spaces and an air of youth—he was in his early 40s, pretty young for an art museum director. He immediately started to reinvent the span of Miracle Mile that had been bequeathed to him. In 2008 the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opened in a new building by Renzo Piano, the first in a series of stages all designed by Piano, the Pritzker Prize winner most famous for building the Pompidou with Richard Rogers. Govan not only moved on from future design plans, he made it clear that the 1960s buildings would have to be demolished. He was not coy about this.
“I literally came to LACMA to tear the whole thing down,” he told The New Yorker in 2020 as he was tearing it down.
Right off the bat, Govan offered the building to Zumthor, the lauded minimalist architect who had never designed a building in America. No competition, no tryouts, no picking by committee. This was fully Govan’s choice, and Los Angeles had to embrace it.
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“I learned about him when I was working with him at Dia and had no idea I would be here,” Govan tells me, explaining that Zumthor had come up with a plan for a pavilion of Walter De Maria works that was never completed.
“So he described this experience in Los Angeles and the American artists he was interested in. I was like, ‘Yeah, why hasn’t he built a building in the US?’ ”
For Zumthor, the proposal was a bit of a shock.
“All of a sudden he called as a surprise, and then he came to the point and said, ‘I’m about to accept the position in Los Angeles to be the director of this museum there. And there I have to build a new building, and I think you should be the architect for the new building,’ ” Zumthor recalls over an extremely picturesque Zoom from his offices in the Swiss town of Haldenstein, in the Alps. “It sounded a bit like, ‘I’m only going there if you’re agreeing to be the architect.’ ”
Zumthor accepted, and Govan accepted. In due time the architect came up with an undulating single-story blob that people hated. And then there was the glass—the architect loved the flora and fauna of the city and wanted to bring it into the museum, which is not typical of your encyclopedic mausoleums to culture, walled off from the outside world.
“I never imagined Peter would be this radical,” Govan says as the sheer intensity of that much glass dawns on us, walking through the space. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, okay, then we’re doing windows all the way around.’ I was like, ‘You can’t do windows...can you?’ And we worked it out, but it’s just a super-radical idea, right?”
For Zumthor, who collaborated with the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the process was buttressed by a mutual trust and the freedom to pursue his vision to its full extent.
“He knows how to deal with artists and with architects—he takes architects as artists,” Zumthor says. “He criticizes them and so on and said this and that. But this he told me from the beginning: ‘It’s going to be your thing. You will sign the work, and I will not have the last word.’ And he kept that for many years.”
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Criticism is subjective, but the numbers don’t lie. Scraping together the funds was always going to be a massive undertaking. Board co-chair Willow Bay, the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, has been a trustee since 2007, shortly after Govan stepped in as director. Once Govan brought in his plan for Zumthor to completely rethink the museum campus, the board snapped into action. “The first step wasn’t asking for money—it was making sure that the idea was strong enough, powerful enough, to deserve a campaign of this scale,” says Bay, who for years has funded the maintenance of Chris Burden’s Urban Light along with her husband, Disney CEO Bob Iger. “We asked lots of questions about the design, about the finances, about the impact that it would have, pressure testing the notion that it would have the kind of impact we believed that it would.”
Eventually, the board did have to ask for money. After some false starts, a windfall came when David Geffen, the longtime contemporary art collector, made his historic pledge in 2017, injecting some excitement into a campaign that had been sputtering.
Govan watched as the budget ballooned, and what was initially supposed to be a $650 million building became a $720 million albatross. But miraculously, the building’s form started to take shape, and when Angelenos started to get wind of the finished product, people actually seemed to like it. The most brash design feature—the bridge that allows cars to drive directly below installed artworks, as museumgoers cross the Miracle Mile from above—started to get serious praise after it finally vaulted over the road in 2024.
“Wilshire is a real kind of symbolic divide, if you will,” Mitchell says. “All of the museums and all of that was literally on the north side of Wilshire. And to build this literal and figurative bridge deeper into the deep culture, the ethnic culture of LA between Koreatown, and Little Ethiopia, and South LA...it’s a bridge across into the district that’s really powerful.”
Govan, for his part, downplays the controversy. “When we proposed the Guggenheim in Bilbao and that whole project, there were protests in the street,” he says. “There were no protests in the street here.”
He is walking from outside of one of the walled-off rooms that punctuate the single-floor flow-through space, perhaps the only partitions in a museum building that lacks transitional corner-turns and corridors, which traditionally break up an art-viewing excursion. “I’m super empathetic,” he says. “Every once in a while, you need to try new things. I always say LA is the place to try it. I don’t know that you try this in, even, Chicago, or Cincinnati. LA’s the place.”
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For years he was in what he says was an impossible situation. He had to sell the idea of the building years before residents could see it, feel it, drive by it, walk into it. Zumthor wasn’t brand-name famous among Angelenos. Odds are most Dodgers fans haven’t seen, say, his Kunsthaus Bregenz, in a small town on the northern edge of the Austrian alps. “And if you’ve never seen it before, how are you going to get it?” Govan admits. “Certainly in places like Dia Beacon, if I had shown it to everybody, it’d be: ‘That’s weird. Why would you have 17 artists in a giant factory space like that?’ But of course, we didn’t have the scrutiny.”
So the editorials, the outrage, the pulling of promised gifts—all that stuff made sense to him?
“If they don’t have an opinion, then you have to worry,” he says. “If you’re in a city, you’re in a civic space.”
Geffen was unfazed. “I have spent most my life working with artists and never cared about criticism of their work. Michael had an idea that I believed in, Zumthor’s design was magnificent, and LA is better because of them both. That simple,” he says.
Govan mentions that, in discussions with the museum’s public relations team, one school of thought focused on winning over the public writ large, that the idea was to “get everybody on your side,” as ­he puts it. He disagreed.
“And I was like, ‘No, no, let people get invested,’ ” he says.
Zumthor says that Govan had the best advice for tuning out the criticism of the plan. “Once, years ago, I asked, ‘Michael, should I follow this newspaper discussion?’ ” Zumthor recalls. “Then he said, ‘No, forget it. You don’t have to do this. You do the building, I do the politics.’ ”
LACMA opens to the public next month and will host a number of bigwigs for a series of dinners and activations. It’s intended to be a celebration for the Angeleno artist community, especially for those commissioned to make works for the new museum and the plaza: Jeff Koons, Liz Glynn, Thomas Houseago, Shio Kusaka, Pedro Reyes, Diana Thater, to name a few. Inevitably there will be impromptu photo shoots next to the most photographed work in LACMA’s collection, Urban Light, the series of street lamps that acts as catnip to tourists and influencers.
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But one sculpture installed beside the new museum is getting more attention than most. That would be Koons’s Split-Rocker, a massive kid’s rocking horse cut down the middle and merged with a dinosaur’s head then covered in flowers. Donated by longtime patrons Lynda and Stewart Resnick, it hugs the road in a way that makes it unmissable to commuters on their way west down Wilshire. Once upon a time another Koons was set to grace the new LACMA, but it’s since drifted into Koonsian lore, as perhaps his most batshit-ambitious unrealized project. Koons called the titanic sculpture Train, and it was going to be a 70-foot replica of a 1940s locomotive suspended nose to tail from a 160-foot crane—“Go west, young man” manifest density writ large, an American magnum opus too quixotic even for Hollywood. “Eli Broad loved Jeff Koons, so I thought I’d get some support—we worked with Disney Imagineering, we scanned a train, and Wallis Annenberg helped me with it...but the scale of the project was, in the end, bigger than a building,” Govan says.
The train was never constructed, and Split-Rocker is maybe better for the museum at the end of the day. It even edges LACMA back toward its historical predecessors, the old-world encyclopedic museums, the ones that Govan is in some way trying to replace—but is, inevitably, forever measured against.
“It is a guardian,” he says of the disjointed rocking horse. “Urban Light is the Greco-Roman temple façade. Barbara Kruger’s piece is like the entry text you get that’s supposed to be friendly, but it’s contemporary. The Heizer sort of fills in for the obelisk. And this is, for me, like the lions in front of the Art Institute of Chicago, the guardians on this side.”
He pauses for a second as the magic-hour light comes over his museum, decades in the making, without the public having stepped inside yet. Will it be an old museum or a new museum? It will be both.
“They’ll make up their minds and they’re going to come see it—the number of people who’ve actually seen it from here is minuscule,” he says. “You know Frank Gehry now, but Disney Hall?”
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“Quite controversial,” I say.
“I don’t think that was any different, was it? It turned out okay,” he goes on. “So I think that’s kind of great that LA’s had this boldness of thinking differently and people sticking with things.”
He takes one more glance at the Koons that came to be, from a walkway in the sky on top of a boulevard.
“Yeah,” Govan says. “I think that looks so good.”
Hair products by Philip B.; makeup products by Dior; grooming products by Dior Sauvage; hair, Helen Robertson; makeup and grooming, Sara Tagaloa. Produced on location by Preiss Creative. Photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (All except Zumthor). _Nate Freeman_VanityFair