LACMA Parking Garage

LACMA Parking Garage
Originally uploaded by sketchypad.annex.

Today on Flickr I came across a really amazing series of photographs of the LACMA parking garage. I had never heard of it before, but apparently in 2000, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee to decorate their parkade in conjunction with an exhibit.

The space is fascinating, it looks like you could wander around there for days, viewing the paintings from new perspectives and finding new pieces hidden in corners. Even better, their pieces brought in more artists that added more work, so the whole thing was covered with paintings and paste-ups and tags.

The crazy part is...it's gone. The entire parkade was demolished a few months ago to make way for a new museum wing. Almost none of the artwork was saved. I can't really wrap my head around that. Every gallery and museum I've ever worked at always had an impossible reverence for everything in it's collection. No matter how insignificant an object seemed, I always had to handle it with the same care as one that famous or precious. LACMA had some strange reasoning, that street art is meant to be ephemeral and thus shouldn't be saved from the demolition. Which is true, but also totally ridiculous when you look at how valuable and collectable this stuff has become. It's long since transcended throw-away status and become a respected art form (and whether this is good or bad could be debated forever)

So, does that mean that LACMA thought of the whole thing as decorative rather than legitimately artistic? As in, rather than commissioning artists to create a site-specific work, they had simply hired a couple people to brighten the place up? Like when banks hire someone to paint their windows for major holidays. Holiday ends, paint gets scraped off, nobody thinks twice. I guess if that was their opinion, then they really wouldn't have seen the point of spending thousands of dollars to slice the concrete and transport the painted slabs. To me it looks like the inexplicable destruction of irreplacable art which reflected a specific time, place and culture...

But hey, what do I know? It's too late now.