Christopher Knight draws interesting connections between Norton Simon and Eli Broad in the Los Angeles Times. Both were renowned Los Angeles collectors. Broad shares

Simon’s flirtations with giving the collection away (at least seven institutions); distrust of traditional museum management; engineering of a bailout of an artistically adventuresome but financially faltering institution (the old Pasadena Museum for Simon, MOCA for Broad); later deciding to open his own museum, and more. […]

Simon had scant interest in contemporary art. Sculptures by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were about as close as he got. In 1968 he did pay $65,000 for “Cubi XXVIII” by the late American sculptor David Smith.

He sold the masterpiece in 1982 for $1.1 million — a not-uncommon practice in which Simon, acting like a dealer, took a big profit to subsidize other endeavors. Twenty-three years later, Smith’s sculpture went under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Its staggering sale price of $23.8 million set a new benchmark as the most expensive contemporary work then sold at auction. The buyer was Eli Broad.

Eli Broad, Today’s Norton Simon (Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire takes on the logic behind Eli Broad’s rallying cry that art should be on display but not in storage:

Broad has long struck the quasi-populist note that evil, elitist museum directors are scheming to put art (Broad’s art!) in storage. He’s used this versatile talking point to justify yanking his collection from BCAM and building yet another museum to house it. (The new museum will reportedly be smaller than BCAM: Broad is a man of many paradoxes.) Broad talks as if everything in his 2000-piece collection can and must eventually be on permanent view. The art that’s not in his planned museum will be lent out, notwithstanding the fact that this would require the equivalent of about ten Whitney Museums, sitting empty out in the hinterlands. bThe bottom line is that there is more art than museum space to show it. Thus museum installations, particularly of contemporary art, are ever-changing and (to use the fashionable term) “curated.” What’s so bad about that?

The Puzzling Paradox of Broad’s Basement (Los Angeles County Museum on Fire)