Peter Aspden of the Financial Times talks to Eli Broad as Broad makes the publicity rounds for his re-launch of LA’s MoCA and searches for a permanent director for the museum:
But this has been more than an emergency turnround. Broad’s ambitions are greater than that. At the heart of his donation and support is a determination to put his adopted city at the heart of world culture: to make it, in his own words, “the most important city for contemporary art in the world”, and a must-visit cultural destination. “LA is really, in my view, one of the four major cultural capitals of the world, together with New York, London and Paris. But the number of people that we get as cultural tourists is a fraction of those cities. Why? Because people don’t realise what we have.
“In the performing arts, no one has a greater symphony hall or symphony orchestra than we do. We have great opera with [the LA Opera general director] Plácido Domingo. We’ve got more theatrical productions than New York or London – admittedly they’re all spread out. And then there are all the great museums we have here. Los Angeles is in the process of changing – and we’ve got to do a better job at communicating what we have to the rest of the world.”
Putting LA at the Heart of World Culture (Financial Times)
