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Michael Govan: Kingpin of L.A.'s global arts ambition
Michael Govan, photographed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles on Nov. 14.
When Michael Govan joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as director in 2006, he had a vision: to create an arts and culture town square, in sprawling and diffuse Los Angeles, along museum-heavy Miracle Mile. He had a 340-ton boulder hauled from a Riverside-area quarry to the Wilshire Boulevard museum in 2012 for a monumental sculpture, by Michael Heizer, to mark his LACMA campus. The artwork, “Levitated Mass,” is a beacon of sorts, visible from the street.
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A specialized “transporter,” nearly three freeway lanes wide, carried the two-story-high boulder, which was shrink-wrapped and illuminated with string lights, very slowly over 11 nights — it traveled 5 miles per hour, through four counties and 22 cities, not unlike an evolving, mobile performance art piece. It drew crowds into the hundreds, with spectators wandering onto their porches or front lawns, in their pajamas in the middle of the night, as the spectacle inched toward the museum.
It was equally a feat of transportation engineering and a logistical nightmare (traffic lights and power lines were reconfigured). But the project drew global marketing for the museum, with international TV crews covering it. And it was a harbinger of things to come: Change was on the horizon at LACMA. And, like Govan’s monolith, it was going to be big.
‘Michael has been tenacious in reaching the goal he set of reimagining what LACMA will be.’
— Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors
Govan — famously camera-ready, with a slender frame and seemingly elastic smile — has since cemented himself as one of the city’s most influential, if not divisive, arts leaders. LACMA’s $750-million new building — now about 80% complete and targeting a late 2024 completion — is one of the highest-profile new museum projects globally. And it’s rising amid a Los Angeles museum boom and commercial gallery expansion; the city now hosts one of the most active art scenes in the world. And LACMA is at the center of that activity.
But Govan’s new museum building has also been a lightning rod for controversy. The cost — $125 million of which is coming from Los Angeles County taxpayers — has been an especially heated issue. Govan insists the project’s price tag has not risen despite breaking ground during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with subsequent labor challenges and supply-chain issues, problems that slowed other museum construction projects such as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Not to mention inflation.
LACMA holds that construction costs were contractually “locked in” as of August 2020 and that additional costs are being covered by a contingency budget, explaining why, the museum said, the overall cost hasn’t risen.
A project of this magnitude is “very rare because of its scope and its ambition,” said Christine Anagnos, executive director of the New York-based Assn. of Art Museum Directors. “You don’t see a lot of museum buildings come up from scratch — it shows real dedication to the city. Michael has been tenacious in reaching the goal he set of reimagining what LACMA will be.”
To say that there are varying opinions about Govan’s vision for what LACMA “will be,” however, is an understatement.
Architectural preservationists still mourn that Govan razed four longtime LACMA buildings to make way for the Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries: William L. Pereira’s 1965 Leo S. Bing Center, his 1960 Hammer and Ahmanson buildings and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ 1980s Art of the Americas building. And the new building’s design — an amorphous-looking, raised, single-story exhibition hall straddling Wilshire — has been hotly debated. Some see the modernist building as innovative from a design front while others liken it to a freeway overpass. But at the heart of the controversy lies the fact that the new building will be smaller, featuring a total of 110,000 square feet of gallery space instead of the combined, roughly 120,000 square feet of the four demolished buildings. Times critic Christopher Knight dubbed it “The Incredible Shrinking Museum.”
‘To say that there are varying opinions about Govan’s vision for what LACMA “will be” … is an understatement.’
Govan’s vision for the new LACMA — a nonhierarchical, decentralized “21st century museum” that is flexible and accessible to everyone — is an honorable one. Some art world insiders have called him “visionary” and “ahead of his time.” But others fear the new building will be the downfall of the largest art museum in the West. LACMA’s encyclopedic collection has, for more than 60 years, presented global art history across thousands of years that schoolchildren, say, could find easily and visit regularly; the new LACMA will feature art from the museum’s permanent collections in rotating, cross-departmental special exhibitions.
The Ahmanson Foundation, LACMA’s largest donor of European Old Master paintings and sculptures, so disagreed with Govan’s reformatting plans, which don’t include permanent displays of signature works, that it ended its five-decade partnership with the museum in 2020.
“We all know the ramifications of this,” said architecture writer and longtime LACMA critic Greg Goldin. “We’re never gonna see the great majority of art in the museum’s encyclopedic collection. Which has meaning. It has meaning because it’s a repository of every aspect of global culture. And how you approach that, curatorially, is profoundly impacted by what the building is capable of and if the building is large enough to dig into those collections. But the new building, it’s a museum in storage, and will remain permanently in storage — and with enormous debt.”
“It’s hard, if not impossible, to see this new project as a win,” Rob Hollman, executive director of the advocacy group Save LACMA, adds, referring to the museum’s $619 million in debt and about $128 million in other liabilities — a total of about $747 million, according to its most recent 990 tax filing.
Others vehemently disagree.
Stephan Jost, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario — which broke ground in May on a new, $73-million modern and contemporary art wing — calls Govan’s approach to the new LACMA building “genius.”
“He’s hired an architect whose buildings exude permanence. They’re elemental, huge solid blocks of granite. They feel like they’ll be around in 1,000 years — in a city that’s known for tearing things down,” Jost said. “And the nonhierarchical structure — that nothing is fixed, it’s all flexible — means L.A. County will be the most responsive to art. There’s no bias, no white supremacy built in. L.A. County will be in sync with the people of today. No one’s going to remember the budget in 10 years!”
Govan has spoken of satellite locations to feature additional art from the collections and to widen the museum’s geographic reach, including in South Los Angeles. And LACMA has forged community partnerships throughout L.A. County to display art from its collections, such as at Charles White Elementary School. But no dedicated satellite locations have materialized yet. The museum said that one, at South L.A.’s Magic Johnson Park, in collaboration with L.A. County, is in the “early stages of planning.”
Govan, 60, came to LACMA from New York’s Dia Art Foundation, where he served as director from 1994 to 2006; before that he spent six years as deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But the new LACMA building will be his legacy — in Los Angeles and in the art world. As such, Govan has ensured that LACMA has grown, in many ways, under his leadership.
Govan’s vision for the new LACMA — a nonhierarchical, decentralized ‘21st century museum’ that is flexible and accessible to everyone — is an honorable one.
Even as LACMA’s overall exhibition space shrinks with the new Zumthor building, the museum’s campus has expanded — and its visitorship has risen — during Govan’s tenure. He debuted the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008 (planned before his arrival) and spearheaded the debut of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion for temporary exhibitions in 2010. In addition to “Levitated Mass,” Govan commissioned several large-scale works for the museum’s campus, including Chris Burden’s now-iconic “Urban Light” (2008), Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Shafted)” (2008) and Robert Irwin’s “Primal Palm Garden” (2010).
During Govan’s tenure, LACMA has grown its permanent collection too, through donations and purchases, by more than 44,000 works. And annual attendance has nearly doubled from about 600,000 to an average of more than 1 million.
Govan is also a savvy, charismatic fundraiser. In August 2023, the museum announced that it had surpassed its $750-million capital campaign goal for the new building — a chunk of those funds acquired during the uncertain times of the pandemic. The campaign now stands at more than $779 million. Govan has also expanded the museum board by 14 members since 2020, bringing in $353 million in board contributions to date.
“He’s going to get this done,” said art world observer Paul Schimmel, formerly chief curator of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “And it will put not just him, but Los Angeles on the map. Whether some people like the building or not.”
Govan’s new museum, a county museum, will belong to the public. It will change the face of Los Angeles. For better or worse? That remains to be seen. By the end of this year, we might have a clearer idea.
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Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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