Los Angeles’s Soaring Arts Scene Confronts a Changing Landscape

Its cultural institutions, buffeted by the pandemic, will have to recover without the help of Eli Broad, the transformational benefactor who died last month.

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an open construction pit these days, surrounded by 12-foot-high wooden fences, with cranes rising across now open skies. Most of its midcentury modernist complex on Wilshire Boulevard was quietly demolished during the Covid shutdown to make way for a wavy $650 million light-filled building spanning the boulevard and designed by the architect Peter Zumthor. LACMA, as it is known, has long been a cultural anchor for Southern California, extraordinarily popular and as responsible as any institution for helping define the region’s cultural identity. “New Galleries. More Art. Opening 2024,” promises a sign in the courtyard. But the success of its next incarnation is hardly assured as the museum seeks to redefine its mission in a smaller building whose design, if adventurous, is not universally acclaimed. It is not only LACMA that finds itself in a moment of transition. Before the pandemic froze California in a wave of shutdowns and disease, Los Angeles had established itself as a cultural capital with its galaxy of museums, galleries and performing arts institutions, defying dated stereotypes of a superficial Hollywood with little interest in art. It now confronts uncertainty across its cultural landscape.