Los Angeles County Museum on Fire can be a pretty insightful blog, their latest post on Renoir in the 20th C. may be the best one the blog has posted yet. The blog discusses the strange fact that some awesome early modernists loved late Renoir (like Matisse, Apollinaire…) but today we see it as shlocky and to use LACMoF’s word, “icky.”
But late Renoir aside, LACMoF had one priceless line about the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, which does a fantastic job of characterizing that institution within an institution, or whatever it is:
“BCAM” is becoming more and more like Voltaire’s definition of the Holy Roman Empire: “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
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Caption: Ed Ruscha, “LACMA On Fire” (1965-68) in the collection of the Hirshhorn
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