For French radio journalist Carole Germain, it may be the biggest challenge she’s faced since arriving in Los Angeles two years ago: How to explain the sprawling new Getty Center to an audience with little direct knowledge of L.A. and how to do it in a mere 60 seconds.
“I’m going to try and sum up the idea that this is a turning point for L.A.,” said Germain, lingering briefly beside an ornate 17th century French tapestry hanging in the Getty’s new decorative arts gallery. “The image of L.A. is Hollywood and Disneyland. But there is something else here, also.”
Germain, who covers Southern California for French-language radio stations in Switzerland and Quebec, was among approximately 700 reporters who descended on the 110-acre Getty campus over three days last week in advance of the center’s Dec. 16 public opening.
Considering the Getty’s impressive scale (110 acres), hefty price tag (more than $1 billion) and wide array of cultural offerings (five exhibition galleries, six research and educational institutes), it is likely that the 700 journalists will be filing at least as many different stories about the facility.
For Italian freelancer Carlo Bizio, who spends most of his time chasing down Hollywood celebs for Italian newspapers and magazines, the new Getty will help pay the bills for some time.
He plans to write at least three different dispatches about the center: a general feature for a Sunday newspaper magazine; a story about the Getty’s elaborate high-tech infrastructure for a computer publication; and a profile of Salvatore Settis, the Italian-born director of The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, for an Italian arts magazine.
According to Bizio, Italian tourists have long flocked to the Getty’s former site, a cliff-side villa in Malibu, both to admire its stunning views and to scoff at L.A.’s brazen attempt to duplicate the “real” villas back home.
The new Getty Center, Bizio predicted, also will be a popular destination for Italians only it won’t be as easy to mock.
“It’s a beautiful museum,” he said. “It may change the idea of L.A. as a cultural wasteland.”
That was a common refrain among L.A.-based foreign correspondents last week, many of whom complained that editors back home only want to hear about Hollywood and, increasingly these days, El Ni & #324;o.
“There is a certain amount of skepticism, almost condescension, about L.A.,” said Helene Laube, California correspondent for the large Zurich-based business weekly, Cash. “Maybe it has to do with envy that this is possible here, and that they had the money to do it on such a scale.”
Like local art and architecture commentators, many also wondered whether situating the new Getty atop a hill in the tony Westside community of Brentwood makes sense in a city as ethnically and economically diverse as Los Angeles.
“I wonder how ‘public’ the Getty will be,” said Noriko Takiguchi, a contributor to Japanese newspapers and architecture journals.
Not very, speculated Carlos Groppa, editor of La Prensa, a 30-year-old Spanish-language weekly based in L.A.
The city’s recent Latino immigrants, he said, are not likely to patronize the new Getty regardless of the extensive media hype surrounding its opening.
Latino immigrants “are pushed here by economic problems,” said Groppa, who emigrated here from his native Argentina two decades ago. “They want to find something better. But they don’t come for culture. They come for jobs.”
