LACMA-daisical

I’m tempted to quote Dionne Warwick’s famous line “LA is a great big freeway” as a breezy lede to the Los Angeles County Art Museum’s preopening of the David Geffen Galleries, if only to insert the singer and psychic’s name into the pages of LARA, but Los Angeles is not a great big freeway. However, Peter Zumthor’s infrastructural art museum is (as I’ve written before) an overpass.

The overpass is certainly another well-worn trope—some soaring CalTrans feats and others wrapped in chain link and hung with NO ICE banners. Yet it’s also a moment of spatial trespass, where one part of the urban fabric folds back on another.

In late June, CEO and director Michael Govan led press through the new museum building, winding our group through the monochromatic gray concourses that span Wilshire Boulevard. For weeks, immigration and other federal agents had snatched (and continue to snatch) migrants from public life, leaving behind vacant fruit stands and taco trucks. Gathering at LACMA to admire the imposition of Zumthor’s monumental form on Miracle Mile offered a privileged d…