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Public-private partnership can be great for cultural centres: LACMA Chief Michael Govan
LACMA CEO Michael Govan visited Mumbai with trustees for a cultural exchange with NMACC, following Isha Ambani's board appointment. Discussions are moving towards concrete actions, including a Bharti Kher exhibition, artist residencies, and craft collaborations, aiming to deepen the relationship between the institutions.
Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), led a delegation of trustees to Mumbai as part of a cultural exchange with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC). The trip, which follows Isha Ambani's appointment to LACMA's board of trustees last year, is intended to deepen the relationship between the two institutions. In a conversation with Apoorva Mittal , Govan says discussions are shifting “from the formal and learning phase to material action”, including a Bharti Kher exhibition at LACMA, artist residencies linking Los Angeles and Mumbai, and collaborations in craft and textile exchange. Edited excerpts:
This is your fifth trip to India. What is different this time?
Each time we are learning and creating friendships. This trip is very meaningful. Now our board members are here—two co-chairs and others—to learn and be introduced to craft and art here. Many of them have never been to India.
What are some of the projects or collaborations being discussed with NMACC?
This is the beginning. In a year and a half, we will have an exhibition of Bharti Kher, the first Indian woman to have a show at LACMA. We have started acquiring works from living Indian artists. We are also talking about residencies—bringing Los Angeles artists to Mumbai to be in residence in craft workshops and exchanges. My first visits were formal and learning; now we are trying to put it into material action. This is the launching pad for many things that will happen in the future.
How do you view India's role on the global cultural stage?
India has one of the largest, most powerful collections of cultures—not just one. It's been so powerful in its own right that, until now, it has felt self-sufficient. Whereas when I go to Korea or other places, there are very specific government and personal initiatives to promote Korean culture, for example, in Los Angeles. What's changing [in India] is a growing interest in exchange and we want to be part of that. That will have many benefits.
You have almost doubled LACMA's visitors from around 600,000 to over 1 million. How can India build a museum-going culture?
We have grown a lot—and the new building at LACMA will increase that further. The key is accessibility. Traditional museums are aimed at people who grew up going to museums. We wanted to make it accessible for everyone and entice those who just want to walk in the park to come to the museum. We made LACMA feel like a park through outdoor concerts and major art works outside.
We also reversed the museum's timeline: starting in the present and then using that and artists' visions of the present to help construct an understanding of the past.
One of the main design points of building the new museum was to remove hierarchies. Our new building has all collections on one floor. There are no chronologies—contemporary art sits next to ancient art. Nations are mixed, and even all the media is mixed so you can have craft and textile with painting and sculpture. The idea is to present a world picture without hierarchies among cultures but interactions. That sounds academic but that is key to bringing visitors. I think people sense when there is a hierarchy. And the design was more like a walk in a park, to wander through culture.
We need to have a different attitude—not talk down—to today's museum-goers, to young people. We are also very involved in technology. We sponsor and support many artists. We have an art and technology lab.
What is your view on AI in art?
I studied art and computers as a young person. I was programming AI in the 1980s. AI is really the embedding of human knowledge and understanding over multiple lifetimes. Like most technologies, it can be used for good or bad. It can work against us or expand our understanding.
For curators, it allows centuries of expertise to become more accessible across fields, enabling collaboration that wasn't possible before. For museum visitors, it can create a far richer experience instead of a small text next to an artwork; AI can let people examine the surroundings in all their richness, in directions that are relevant to them. For artists, it is opening up new creative worlds. We have an AI work at LACMA by Beeple [famous for selling Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69 million] based on our collection, where five curators selected six objects each and AI turned them into a three-dimensional audiovisual experience.
But AI also raises questions of ownership, reproduction and intellectual property. How do you grapple with such concerns?
In our case, the art works and data are from known authors and sources in public domain. So these are closed systems that are working with sourced information that is free and accessible legally. Many artists, like Refik Anadol, create and own their own data systems. It can be used badly to exploit artists or beautifully to empower artists to do new things. That's true of everything.
And what would the exchange between LACMA and NMACC look like?
There's a tradition of institutional exchange in the cultural world—we send you an exhibition; you send us one back. I've done that for 40 years.
What's more important now is building long-term relationships with people, not just one off with an institution. What happens if people become friends across worlds and they share what they are doing?
Political parties change, governance changes, but cultural institutions tend to be very consistent and sustainable. Think about how long they have lasted. That's the longterm thinking that doesn't exist in other traditional means of diplomatic exchange.
Can you share one out-of-the-box idea discussed on this trip?
This morning, we talked about craft and textile work here. There's a poet in Southern California, a Black woman scholar who knows Sanskrit. I'm thinking of bringing her here to work with textile craftspeople and maybe embed poetry from her perspective of Southern California into woven textiles.
What are some of the steps India can take to build cultural institutions for the future?
There's huge possibility here. I went to the opening of NMACC and visited the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art site. You can feel the momentum.
Infrastructure is being built, which is key.
One of the things we do well in the US which I would encourage is public-private partnership. LACMA is a public-private partnership where Los Angeles County and the public support probably 25% of our operating cost, and the rest is private. It is collaborative, and it yields very powerful results, because you get the best of public support, and private support, which is agile and creative and risk-taking. I think more exchange would be better.
India has been more closed off, and you don't see that many collaborations like what we are establishing. I am a believer in connectivity of the world. Whatever we do here could be a model for others.
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Source: EconomicTimes
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