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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The new LACMA is sleek, splotchy, powerful, jarring, monotonous, appealing and absurd
Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings' raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn't open until April 2026. Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard. Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer's fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn's refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil's Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still's rugged painting motifs. Zumthor's Geffen doesn't come close. I've written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design's negative impact on the museum program, but that's now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.'s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda. Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now. I've pretty much avoided consideration of the building's aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to 'The Presence of the Past,' a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor's still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool's errand when you can't experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens. A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there's a reason they're called shows — and chances are you've never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it's sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' meets Beckett's theater of the absurd. Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem. Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum's construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell's was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear. The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below. Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive. Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh. Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be 'a concrete sculpture,' which is why it's being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it's true, it's the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture. That's odd, because we've also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between 'upstairs/downstairs,' confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant. LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won't regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian. Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won't be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum's priority. An urban environment with a talented architect's unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that's a description of Frank Gehry's incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons' marvelous floral 'Puppy' sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture's control over nature; Koons' 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too. The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons' floral behemoth, 'Split-Rocker,' a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur's head with the hobby horse's head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history's triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.'s eye-grabbing building won't be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice? As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn't be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket. It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world's largest travel and tourism sector, but it's the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics. It's also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA's lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week. Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let's hope they don't know something we also don't know.
India.com
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
Meet world's richest star, has net worth Rs 69000 crore, richer than Shah Rukh Khan, Salman, Aamir combine, not Tom Cruise, The Rock, name is...
Did you believe that Beyoncé, Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Shah Rukh Khan, or even Taylor Swift are the richest people in the world of film? The real chunk of Hollywood wealth—a man who has never even been in front of a camera—is far more impressive than any of these megastars. Hollywood's billionaire king Introducing David Geffen, a media tycoon, record executive, and film producer who, as of May 2025, Forbes estimates, is the richest person in Hollywood with an astounding net worth of $8.3 billion. With $5.3–$5.7 billion, Geffen's fortune dwarfs that of industry tycoons like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Mark Cuban. Geffen is far wealthier than even Oprah Winfrey ($3.1 billion) and Jay-Z ($2.5 billion), the richest musician in the world. In actuality, you would still have less than 25% of Geffen's wealth if you added up the fortunes of Tom Cruise, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé. The story behind the fortune Geffen's ascent to fame started modestly as a teenage extra. He was a talent manager by the late 1960s and co-founded Asylum Records in 1971, signing such legendary artists as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and the Eagles. With the establishment of Geffen Records in 1980—home to legends like Neil Young, Elton John, Cher, Guns N' Roses, and Nirvana—he furthered his Midas touch. Geffen did more than just make music, though. In 1982, he established the Geffen Film Company, which produced Broadway triumphs like Dreamgirls and Cats as well as cult favorites like Beetlejuice. He then co-founded DreamWorks SKG, the formidable studio behind Shrek, Transformers, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, and American Beauty, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994. David Geffen is not only the richest man in Hollywood but also the wealthiest celebrity in the world thanks to his empire, which spans five decades and numerous businesses. Even while the performers receive most of the attention, Geffen, who works in the background, is the real owner of the program.
Hindustan Times
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Hollywood's richest man doesn't act, sing; yet has $8.3B net worth; more than Tom Cruise, Taylor Swift, Beyonce combined
If one talks about the richest people in world cinema, one assumes that actors like Tom Cruise and Shah Rukh Khan, or filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, would be in contention. Even musicians like Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift might be considered. But none of these ultra-rich celebrities hold a candle to the actual richest person in Hollywood - someone who has $8.3 billion, even though he has never faced the camera. Film producer, record executive, and media proprietor David Geffen is the richest man in Hollywood, according to Forbes magazine. With a net worth of $8.3 billion as of May 2025, Geffen is also the richest celebrity in the world. In a career that has spanned five decades, Geffen has founded several successful record labels and owns one of the biggest studios in Hollywood—DreamWorks. David Geffen's $8.3 billion net worth makes him the world's richest celebrity ahead of Mark Cuban, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, all of whom are quite a distance behind him at $5.3-5.7 billion. Oprah Winfrey, the talk show queen, is further back with a reported wealth of $3.1 billion, while the world's richest musician, Jay, has a net worth of $2.5 billion. Geffen is so rich that even if one combines the wealth of mega celebs like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Tom Cruise, the resulting figure of $2.1 billion is just one-fourth of Geffen's net worth. Geffen also founded the Geffen Film Company in 1982, through which he produced dark comedies like Beetlejuice and Broadway musicals such as Dreamgirls and Cats. In 1994, he partnered with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to co-found DreamWorks SKG Studio, which has produced films like Shrek, Transformers, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, and American Beauty.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
David Geffen's Estranged Husband, 32, Requests Spousal Support amid Divorce from Billionaire Music Exec, 82
David Geffen's estranged husband David Armstrong filed a response to the media mogul's divorce filing Armstrong requested spousal support and more A court order gave each party 60 days to share their financial informationDavid Geffen's estranged husband David Armstrong has filed his response to the billionaire's divorce filing, which came earlier this month after nearly two years of marriage. Armstrong, 32, requested spousal support from Geffen, 82, as well as attorney's fees and costs and 'all other relief the Court deems just and proper,' according to documents filed on Tuesday, May 27 and obtained by PEOPLE. Geffen — who is worth $8.7 billion, according to Forbes — filed for divorce on May 16, citing irreconcilable differences. He listed the couple's date of separation as Feb. 22, though Armstrong said their split date was 'TBD' in his response. They were married on March 7, 2023. Geffen's initial filing indicated that he would pay Armstrong's spousal support and attorney's fees. Both filings stated that 'the exact nature and extent of separate property assets and obligations are unknown at this time,' and both parties reserve their right to amend their filings once the information has been ascertained. A court order was issued on May 27 that requires both Geffen and Armstrong (a model and dancer who also goes by the name Donovan Michaels) to share their financial information, including statements, valuations, important facts and access to records about all current income and expenses and community and separate property assets and debts. Each party has 60 days after filing to complete the court order. Geffen, who is now retired, rose to fame as the co-founder and founder of a number of record labels, including Asylum Records, Geffen Records and DGC Records. In 1996, he also co-founded DreamWorks Animation with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Much of his income consists of stocks and equities in property, and California law states that dividends from stocks remain separate, meaning Armstrong likely will not walk away with much cash, TMZ reported. State law also requires divorce petitioners to pay spousal support for half the length of the marriage, meaning Armstrong will likely receive payments for one year. Geffen dated Cher for a year and a half in the early 1970s, and came out as gay in 1992. He and Armstrong largely kept their relationship out of the public eye, though the media mogul did share a now-deleted photo of the pair on a boat in December 2021. 'Merry Christmas indeed!' he captioned the Instagram photo. Read the original article on People
The Star
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
82YO billionaire David Geffen divorcing 32-year-old husband with no prenup
David Geffen (left) was private about his relationship with David Armstrong, though according to People he did share the occasional photo of the two on Instagram. Photo: David Geffen/Instagram Retired music mogul David Geffen has filed for divorce from his dancer husband a month shy of the two-year mark of a marriage with no prenuptial agreement. The 82-year-old billionaire will pay a year of spousal support — half the length of the marriage, as required by California law — to soon-to-be ex David Armstrong, whose stage name is Donovan Michaels, according to the filing obtained by TMZ and People . While there was no prenup, Geffen's main source of income is stocks and other equities, which are considered separate property under California law, and thus so are the dividends, according to TMZ, which first reported on the split. Geffen attributed the breakup to 'irreconcilable differences,' People reported, citing the petition filed May 16 in Los Angeles. They officially separated on Feb 22. High-profile celebrity lawyer Laura Wasser, who has shepherded the likes of Kim Kardashian, Kevin Costner and Ariana Grande through their respective breakups, is representing Geffen. Known as the 'divorce lawyer to the stars,' and dubbed the Disso Queen, Wasser has also overseen the divorces of Jennifer Garner, Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears. Geffen, who came out as gay in 1992, was private about his relationship with Armstrong, a 32-year-old go-go dancer, though according to People he did share the occasional photo of the two on Instagram. A December 2021 snap of him and Armstrong aboard the mogul's US$400mil yacht Rising Sun has since been deleted, People noted. The former record exec, currently worth at least US$8.7bil, founded three labels — Asylum Records, Geffen Records and DGC Records — and co-founded the DreamWorks SKG film studio. The Brooklyn-born Geffen is also known for his US$100mil contribution to the US$550mil renovation of what was formerly Avery Fisher Hall, renamed David Geffen Hall. The renovated space debuted as the new home of the New York Philharmonic when it emerged from a two-year makeover in 2022. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
