LACMA

Did you know that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is free every second Tuesday of the month??



It is! Don't forget to get a ticket anyway. The people at the exhibits will have to go on furlough if you they cant scan your stupid ticket at the door.

My favorite thing about museums is usually the museum itself. There are some great staples: a wonderful wall of Andy Warhol prints, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (roped off to ward off people thinking about using it as a blarney stone), and a beautiful building housing exquisite Chinese art, but the design of a museum is what inspires me most. A museum is a sanctuary.



The LACMA is on Wilshire Blvd. which cuts right through Los Angeles proper and many of the things worth seeing. It is very crowded with childrens' groups and foreign tourists. The sculptures outside are enormous, bright and flashy. Eh. I like the Getty better. Maybe just because its on a hill away from the city. The LACMA feels like it has something to prove.

Right across the street from the Variety building! Shoot for the stars? Not quite.

So because I didn't get what I needed from the museum design, I will write of my favorite exhibit. It is called Fallen Star, 1/5 by Do Ho Suh. The artist created an enormous dollhouse in the form of a New York style brownstone with every detail installed. Each apartment had it's own character. The family with the bottom floor and big, bay window was almost rich with Victorian elements and lavishly decorated. The family on one of the upper floors had less money and clearly had children, who littered the walls with their favorite movie posters. A smaller Korean-style house wrapped in an orange cloth has collided with the bigger dollhouse. The floor is covered in debris from every family's destroyed rooms. A beautiful chandelier from the rich family's home mingles with magazines from the family with children, and works in progress from a tenant who was clearly a designer of some sort. I read an article in which Suh says the work is a "self-portrait"(latimes.com) exemplifying his move to the United States from Korea.

The artist and his work from this site

While I can't say I understand what it would mean to move to a different country as an artist and experience this kind of culture shock, the violence of the sculpture moved some empathy in me, touching on my current torrential uprooting situation.