Here’s How to Rescue a Museum at the Brink

The first thing to be said about the fiscal crisis facing the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, horrendous as it is, is that it could be a lot worse. The museum regularly overran its budget and dipped into its endowment to cover operating costs, which is scandalously irresponsible.

But let’s keep some perspective. The museum needs to raise roughly $25 million and embrace a new strategy to stabilize itself. And it can do it.

This institution has to be born again, wrestled into a new phase of its marvelous history by the people who brought it into being in the first place, with help from the rest of the art world.

But first there needs to be a truce. Both the siege and the bunker mentality must be suspended. People have to set aside their rage at one another and at outside critics. They should stop fretting about their reputations or grudges. Egos have to be left at the door.

Imagine the museum as a gravely ill relative deeply loved by an enormous squabbling family. Does that family really want to come together for the first time at the funeral, especially knowing that the patient could, with cooler heads, have been saved? No. Let’s come together right now. The director of the museum, Jeremy Strick, has to have support and input from his museum-director colleagues about ways to restructure his staff. The directors are known to be a fairly friendly group. The museum’s board, drained by writing last-minute checks to keep the wolf from the door, should sit down with collectors, former trustees and the past and present cultural leaders of Los Angeles. (Joel Wachs, who moved to New York from Los Angeles to lead the Warhol Foundation, comes to mind.)

They need to commiserate, listen to one another, draft a rescue plan and see what kind of money they can scrape together. Everyone needs to step up, including Los Angeles museum professionals, current and former trustees, artists and interested parties everywhere.

But let’s back up for a second. What did Los Angeles get from the Museum of Contemporary Art, despite its chronic mismanagement of money? Plenty. Mainly, the city’s first — and still only — world-class museum.

Brought into existence in 1979 by a contentious group of Los Angeles collectors and artists in a touch-and-go process, the museum is known for an exhibition record that many feel is the best in the country and even the world. Its sweeping thematic-survey exhibitions reshaped our thinking about postwar art by venturing beyond the canon of American and Western European artists, beyond the limits of painting and sculpture.

The titles of those surveys broadcast their ambition: “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object: 1949-1979.” “A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968.” “Reconsidering the Objects of Art: 1965-1975.” “Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors.” Each show came with a thick innovative catalog that resonated long after the exhibition was over.

These shows were in the tradition of the big exhibitions that the Museum of Modern Art once organized. They gave off sparks that challenged and inspired artists, especially those in the area. With the prodding of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles became an incubator of new work on a par with, if not ahead of, New York. In addition there were also monographic shows like a stunningly ambitious installation by Robert Gober in 1997, or a revelatory survey of Sigmar Polke’s photographic work in 1995. Since many of those shows traveled to New York, like the outstanding show of Robert Rauschenberg combines that opened in Los Angeles in 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art was known as one of the greatest feeder museums in the country.

Yet along the way the museum has accommodated a level of financial brinkmanship and organizational dysfunction that often seems deluded. Its founding director was Pontus Hulten, the European impresario who helped invent the notion of the star curator and the sprawling thematic survey and was often indifferent to matters financial. Richard Koshalek, who, after working beside Hulten, became director in 1982, was another visionary, known to operate by seat-of-the-pants improvisation. For better yet also worse, this museum always put curators first.

Under Mr. Strick, who took over in 1999, its endowment has shrunk to $6 million from a reported $50 million as a result of further recklessness. Its board is widely reported to be pondering two rescue possibilities, neither of which is appealing although neither has been properly explained.

One is a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Imagine the effect on New York if MoMA or the Whitney Museum of American Art had been subsumed into the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the age of 30. For one thing P.S. 1, which has been rejuvenated by its MoMA affiliation, might no longer exist.) The other option is a $30 million bailout offered by Eli Broad, the developer, collector and serial museum trustee.

Although Mr. Broad tends to want things his way, he is hardly alone on this score; noblesse oblige is not what it used to be. And he made two salient arguments in an op-ed article last month in The Los Angeles Times: the Museum of Contemporary Art must remain an autonomous entity, and it is time for other patrons to step up to the plate — time for Los Angeles to stop being, as he put it self-flatteringly, “a one-philanthropist town.”

But perhaps there is another way. What if everyone else stopped waiting for the rich people to write all the checks? Their support will be necessary, but the larger art world can also pitch in — not just with emotional support and excitement, but with money.

The recent art boom made quite a few artists almost as rich as philanthropists. You know who you are. But the nonrich need to consider seriously the degree to which the Museum of Contemporary Art has enriched their lives, personal and professional. What is it worth to you to have this museum continue to exist? Would you give $100? $500? $1,000? Would you give $2,300? In other words, take a page from the playbook of the recent campaign of the president-elect, who harnessed small donations, grass-roots organization and a galvanizing sense of individual empowerment to sail to victory.

But first the museum’s board and director need to draft an action plan in concert with Los Angeles’s city and cultural leaders.

We’re waiting. There’s a job to be done, and the no-drama rule must apply.