Or something by another dead guy. Just make the Museum of Art good again. Is now too soon?

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

The Long Beach Museum of Art’s strongest, most varied show in years—of photo-realist street scenes that look like Los Altos; terrifying red clay babies, tall as a man; cool assemblages of made-up Hawaiiana—ends Saturday night with an art auction where the cheap seats are $125 and the others are $250. After that, presumably, everything gets swept up into some rich guy’s art collection in 90803. It’s Art Auction XII, on view just 23 days, 16 of them weekdays. But don’t worry—they’ll do it again in 2009. Deep breath. Consider the source.

“I think I’ve been to one exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art in my entire life, and it was on a whim,” says John Geldbach of Long Beach-based DDR Projects, a California Heights resident and indie record label owner who parlayed a keen eye for emerging art into one of the city’s newest art galleries. “They’ve never done an exhibit that interested me. I’ve been to a slew of shows at the Museum of Latin American Art.”

Geldbach isn’t the only member of the Long Beach art world nursing a grudge against the city’s namesake museum for its seemingly endless exhibits of figurines and—the horror!—teapots, arguably its nadir, in 2003. But for all we know, those were the good old days.

The next 23 months could make or break the Long Beach Museum of Art: it’s the run-up to September 2009, when the museum must repay the $3.1 million it owes the City of Long Beach for its new exhibition gallery, built in 2000.

And way before that, its lawyers will square off in court this November with attorneys for the museum’s recently ousted director, Hal Nelson, eighty-sixed in November 2006. No one’s saying much, except Nelson’s people. They’re suing the Museum Foundation—which runs the museum, and which hired him—plus Foundation Board of Trustees President Pamela Munzer, claiming age discrimination, defamation of character and wrongful termination. He’d like to be paid unspecified financial losses, plus undetermined compensatory and punitive damages. That means big dough.

The legal system takes a long Christma-Hannu-Kwanza-kah break, so with any luck this suit will drag on into 2008 without breathing hard. And Nelson alleges many things that are damning in the art world: that Munzer and the foundation ran him down in public after letting him go; that the foundation didn’t do its job of raising money—including raising enough money to pay off that $3.1 million debt to the city. Nelson also claims that after he left, museum workers hung three of the works in his final show upside down.

That last charge may be a self-criticism of the show—the recent “Painting With Fire: Masters of Enameling in America 1930-1980”—all bright, shiny and abstract. Upside down? How do you know?

“They were hung upside down,” reiterates Nelson’s attorney, Nancy Bornn. “It just goes to show what happens when they excluded my client, who was one of the curators of the exhibition.”

But if they’d excluded him sooner, we might not have had to sit through those teapots. The art museum might not have nodded off for almost 20 years like Rip Van Willmore—or at least that’s what fans of some real artists (see: Diane Arbus) wonder.

“It’s a nice-looking place, but it just sits there,” San Pedro gallery owner Joe Flazh says of the museum. Flazh recently wangled a show of never-before-seen Diane Arbus portraits—an endeavor he says was inspired by shows at the old Long Beach Museum of Art, before Hal Nelson arrived 18 years ago.

“The museum was really an important place to see art and they would do things like have Robert Frank there, at a show of his work,” says Flazh. “That was probably back in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Whoever was in charge had a real vision.”

Lots of people mention that period—the mid-’70s through the mid-’80s, particularly under the aegis of David Ross, who started the video program, and then-museum director Jan E. Adlmann—as the last time the Museum of Art was any good.

“When I was a kid, I took a film class over there, in the ’70s, and it’s one of my best memories of being a kid,” says artist Margie Darrow, whose ethereal, skeletal Equanimity is on the block in Art Auction XII. “It’s kind of a sentimental honor for me being involved.”

Kids weren’t the only ones hanging around, though. By emphasizing an emerging field—video art—and by creating a Video Annex, Long Beach Museum of Art snared the likes of Kira Perov and her husband, seminal video artist Bill Viola, who moved to Long Beach in 1981 and quickly became involved with the museum.

Perov wrote a 1984 history of its early years, and examples of Viola’s work became a cornerstone of the museum’s video art collection. That’s the collection the Getty has now, the one it reportedly will draw from heavily in May for a show of video art.

“With every new director you’ll have a different direction,” Perov says matter-of-factly, having had 10 years to get over the closing of the Video Annex.

But is that really something you get over?

“It was really horrific when the program closed,” Perov says. “It’s not a good idea to close down any program like that, because it [was] a very stimulating thing for the community. I didn’t like any of the changes that happened, to tell you the truth. I became involved in the Long Beach Opera.”

If the Long Beach Museum of Art is famous today, it’s for all the wrong reasons—lawsuits and teapots and a $3.1 million bill—and none of them are art. Sure it has fine architecture and the best view in Long Beach, but so does any Bluff Park home on Ocean Boulevard. Show us the Monet.

“If I had that kind of venue, God! I’d be working it,” says Geldbach, the DDR Projects owner, whose space on Broadway faces away from the ocean. “Bring something in that’s different. If they did just one show that would do that and wake people up. . . .”

It could happen. The city hired Pat West. Isn’t the art museum about due?

Tags: diane arbus, long beach museum of art, pat west, video art