Free The White Album by Joan Didion Page A

opulent evidence of imperial power and acquisition . Ancient murals were not always bleached and mellowed and “tasteful . ” Ancient murals once looked as they do here: as if dreamed by a Mafia don . Ancient fountains once worked, and drowned out that very silence we have come to expect and want from the past . Ancient bronze once gleamed ostentatiously . The old world was once discomfitingly new, or even nouveau, as people like to say about the Getty . (I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns . ) At a time when all our public conventions remain rooted in a kind of knocked-down romanticism, when the celebration of natural man’s capacity for moving onward and upward has become a kind of official tic, the Getty presents us with an illustrated lesson in classical doubt . The Getty advises us that not much changes . The Getty tells us that we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were, and in so doing makes a profoundly unpopular political statement .
    The Getty’s founder may or may not have had some such statement in mind . In a way he seems to have wanted only to do something no one else could or would do . In his posthumous book, As I See It, he advises us that he never wanted “one of those concrete-bunker-type structures that are the fad among museum architects . ” He refused to pay for any “tinted-glass-and-stainless-steel monstrosity . ” He assures us that he was “neither shaken nor surprised” when his villa was finished and “certain critics sniffed . ” He had “calculated the risks . ” He knew that he was flouting the “doctrinaire and elitist” views he believed endemic in “many Art World (or should I say Artsy-Craftsy?) quarters . ”
    Doctrinaire and elitist . Artsy-craftsy . On the surface the Getty would appear to have been a case of he-knew-what-he-liked-and-he-built-it, a tax dodge from the rather louche world of the international rich, and yet the use of that word “elitist” strikes an interesting note . The man who built himself the Getty never saw it, although it opened a year and a half before his death . He seems to have liked the planning of it . He personally approved every paint sample . He is said to have taken immense pleasure in every letter received from anyone who visited the museum and liked it (such letters were immediately forwarded to him by the museum staff), but the idea of the place seems to have been enough, and the idea was this: here was a museum built not for those elitist critics but for “the public . ” Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founder alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding, a place forever “open to the public and free of all charges . ”
    As a matter of fact large numbers of people who do not ordinarily visit museums like the Getty a great deal, just as its founder knew they would . There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here . On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not . On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not . In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least.
    1977
     

 

     
     

    Bureaucrats
     
     
    the closed door upstairs at 120 South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is marked operations center . In the win dowless room beyond the closed door a reverential hush prevails . From six a . m . until seven p . m . in this windowless room men sit at consoles watching a huge board flash colored lights . “There’s the heart attack,” someone will murmur, or “we’re getting the gawk effect . ” 120 South Spring is the Los Angeles office of Caltrans, or the