LACMA: Container and Contained

The best looking solar collectors I’ve ever seen slant over the new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Renzo Piano’s striking modernist design provides a versatile space filled with abundant natural light.

Inside it’s more confusing.  LACMA curators haven’t yet figured out how to use the open plan without it feeling like a warehouse.  The current Olmec statuary exhibition has hundreds of artifacts spread throughout the main gallery with less sense of progression than you find in the layout of a 99¢ Store.

Then there’s the Resnick collection itself, which occupies nearly a quarter of the pavilion.  So ornately classical it borders on kitsch, it even comes complete with – I kid you not – plastic lemon trees.

What are you looking for?