Category: Collector
Nationality: American
Last Year: 10

‘All too often, museum directors and curators are more interested in what their peers think or collectors like myself think than educating a diverse public’, Eli Broad told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. But his activities of the last 12 months might give a few clues as to why museum directors and curators all too often think the way they do. Together with his wife, Edythe, Broad operates a foundation worth around $2.1 billion. The extension to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opened in February 2008 bearing Broad’s name and funded by $60 million from the foundation. Later in the year he pledged $30 million to bail out LA’s near-bankrupt Museum of Contemporary Art. ‘This is not a onephilanthropist town’, Broad wrote in an LA Times opinion piece, although you could be forgiven for thinking it is. Broad describes his activities as ‘venture philanthropy’, which might translate as ‘you don’t get something for nothing’. LACMA thought they were getting Broad’s very significant (although not particularly diverse: the Guerilla Girls point out that the foundation collection – as opposed to Broad’s personal collection – contains work by 194 artists, 96 percent of them white and 83 percent male) art collection when they built the extension. A month before LACMA’s extension (which shows works from the collection) was inaugurated, Broad made it clear, in an interview in The New York Times, that this would not be the case. Some called it the worst PR disaster in LACMA’s history, others claimed that LACMA ‘got screwed’, but perhaps Christopher Knight got it right in the LA Times when he described Broad as ‘a hugely successful businessman who exchanges project involvement for near-absolute control’. Whatever you think about his motives and motivations, there’s no doubt that museums and curators in LA in particular (though there are a number of other museums bearing his name dotted around the US) will probably be most interested in what Broad thinks for some time to come.