The Getty Experience

"The tram is more fun, the shuttle is faster," the woman in uniform shouted. Welcome to the Getty Center.

Any visitors to the Getty Center coming from outside of Los Angeles will remember the lines. The newly-opened $1 billion Getty Center complex has been bursting at its newly-opened seams.

At the summit, the number of people was astounding; the numerous plazas and pavilions were filled with people, and required a wait to do practically anything. Grab lunch at the restaurant or at a snack cart? Wait 45 minutes to reach the food at either location. Women's bathroom? Half an hour. Telephone? 20 minutes. Even the bookstore had a line that stretched all the way around the sleek entrance pavilion.

The number of people would make J. Paul Getty smile and architect Richard Meier cringe. Fifteen years in the making, the new Getty Center, a complex of museums, gardens, auditorium and art research institute and its uniquely manicured space dotted with fountains, is a cultural mecca. Roughly hewn stones unify the five museum buildings, while the Central Garden's zigzag path leads to a floating maze of azaleas beneath a waterfall. Designed by noted landscape architect Robert Irwin, the elegance of the Central Garden is matched in the stark beauty of the cacti on the South Promontory, inaccessibly placed so that they their spiked, vertical forms resonate with the skyscrapers visible on Wilshire Boulevard and in the distant Center City.

Notice I haven't quite mentioned the art yet. The Getty's painting collection, a controversial and relatively new hobby for the trust, is not its strong point. The only significantly famous painting in the collection, for example, is one of van Gogh's Irises, and that room had its own line, stretching more than an hour and all the way across the main pavilion. Why? It turns out the interlocking gallery spaces of the Getty have an air-conditioning system that could not keep rooms pleasant and the paintings safe with so many people in the building. Other rooms were sweltering while the pavilion floor holding the Irises was simply shut off and regulated. The Getty seemed also to suffer for its newness as well as its popularity; one docent told me to "look around" and see if I could find any Bruegel paintings and then come tell her.

The Getty is, in many ways, not about the art, and, not surprisingly, most Angelenos don't seem to care. No matter how long the lines and how mediocre the art viewing in these first overcrowded months, the people of the Southland, and really from all over the world, will continue to stream to the museum. The new Getty Center is a quintessential piece of Los Angeles, replete with grandeur and extravagance. It is the Disneyland of art museums, the Universal Studios of views and thrills and promises to be the trendy destination in America's favorite trendy metropolis.

Like the city that surrounds it, the Getty Center stretches out in all directions, embracing the sun and the views. It proclaims its importance through its extravagance, joining a long tradition from Cecil B. deMille to Wolfgang Puck that has made Los Angeles famous, if not notorious. Situated on one of LA's most prominent hilltops, it has been warmly embraced by the cultural elite and trend-savvy, the type who would hire people to go to the supermarket to avoid the crowds but relish the opportunity to walk the steep incline in their khakis, Abercrombie blazers and sunglasses, working on a list of who first to call on their cellular phones once they reach the top.

More than museum, the Getty is spectacle: the first thing many visitors did was go to the restaurant's porch, overlooking the Brentwood hills, and try to make out celebrities' houses. The line at the bookstore is perhaps the most tellingly Los Angeles--everyone is out to get a poster or T-shirt so they can proudly display the fact that they were among the first to experience the Getty. Visitors shuffled through the rooms, hardly looking at the paintings, making their way to the high walkways to point out their UCLA dorms or their office buildings. Visitors seem to understand that the architecture--bold and iconic--was the most important trait of the new museum, followed closely by its status as a new vantage point. The Getty is a place that is art (that happens to contain it, as well).

In these early weeks, with crowds, lines and general hassle, there is an added benefit for Los Angeles residents to shove, to plan craftily to elude the guards and get into the Irises room, and to negotiate the rapidly-moving, loud, colorful crowd of guests--all famous, at least to themselves. The Getty Center resonates with Angelenos as a idyllic microcosm of their lives: the crowds and chaotic traffic have not disappeared, they're just forgotten amidst the breathtaking views and classy architecture.

When I came down the hill, making my way out through the line forming for taxis and past the same uniformed woman, explaining to a guest that "You'll have to stand in a long line, from which you'll wait in another long line...," I could not help but smile--and despair. The Getty has succeeded as a museum for, and of, Los Angeles.

Adam I. Arenson '00, a resident of California, is proud he does not live in Los Angeles.