I have one request: could someone kiss the Levitated mAss (has anyone made a joke on that yet?) for me and send me the snapshot (ordinarymind@gmail.com)?Thank you!

http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/levitated-mass-transport-a-gawkers-guide/

http://www.lacma.org/levitatedmass

http://www.twitter.com/lacma

The debate about “what is art” or “how money should or shouldn’t be used in the pursuit of art” on this or other online posts regarding the “Levitated Mass” installation may be moot. Especially for those of us who live around LACMA and have to look at the construction everyday. I completely understand all the conversations about this subject. Is it just a rock? What does it really represent? Should this kind of money be spent right now? Does it have deeper meaning because of all the problems with moving it? Does it reflect some kind of political stalemate that is happening in the country today. Or is it just some huge piece of granite that can’t be moved and cost a large pile of money? These are all great questions that should be asked. And from a guy that used to own a creative firm and employed several artist I totally get it. And let me be very clear that I am not against this installation. I think the idea is cool and if you can raise the money privately to create such a piece of art I believe you should go for it. I personally would have preferred Jeff Koons “train” but hey, a big rock is cool to. But at what point do we as residence of Los Angeles and neighbors to LACMA say enough is enough, and demand some basic information.

My wife and I live less than a half block away. Everyday we either walk or drive by what was once a wonderful county park where our small children, no more than nine months ago used to play. Now we see a dirty muddy pit that seems to have no end in site. This makes us truly sad. Not because they are putting a new installation in. We completely support new pieces of art and believe that a museum should be a living, breathing and always changing institution. The only way to keep and maintain a great world class museum is to always be striving for change and be searching for new ideas in the art world. We feel sad because, as neighbors of LACMA, we feel completely forgotten about by the people we want to support. We feel that LACMA forgets that it has neighbors that live near and around the museum and that what the museums does impacts all of us. Now, nothing is perfect. There is no way to please everyone and like the old saying goes about opinions and ass’s, yes everyone does have one. And as for my wife and myself, we are not looking for a personal phone call from Michael Govan informing us of every plan or idea they may have and how they want to proceeding with them. But we do expect to be generally informed of things that impact us and the public at large.

The simple facts is this. There is no rock at LACMA. You can spin it anyway you want, but at some point someone is going to have to take responsibility for the fact that there is a very very expensive hole in what was a really nice county park. Their going to have to explain why millions of dollars were spent on a custom built and painted transporter that has not moved for months with a huge rock on it. And why all this money was spent before they had worked out all the problems with all the different cities involved. It has been almost 4 months since the rock was supposed to be delivered and there has been no real reason given other then “This is hard”. Someone needs to explain why there is no information going out to the public, what the problems are and where are we in the process of getting said rock delivered. Because the longer this goes on and the less information the people of Los Angeles get the more it looks like this was a problem caused by bad decision making by LACMA’s upper management. If this goes on much longer it is going to become a huge embarrassment to the city of Los Angeles as well as to the mayor. Lets hope that some Republican congressman or senator or even city councilman does not start using this as a way to point out wasteful spending. Because God forbid if that does happen then your going to start seeing reporters from such wonderful channels as Fox news calling city hall demanding to know whats going on. And that would suck for everyone that does love the art world. I do understand that this installation was paid for by private donations and not with city or county funds but it is being managed and controlled by county employees for a county museum. And lets fact it, to the Republican party it wont matter who’s paying for it. If they can make the art world look bad they will.

So talk to us. We really do want to help.