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The city gets a brand-new contemporary-art museum
EXPECTATIONS for the Broad, a vast new private museum in downtown Los Angeles, have been growing in the run-up to its opening on September 20th. Eli and Edythe Broad, its patrons, are among America's most prominent contemporary-art collectors. The Broad (it rhymes with "road") is to be the permanent home for the 2,000 works they have amassed over nearly half a century.
As an architectural project, the museum's nervously latticed exterior stands tentatively along Grand Avenue, a cultural corridor that has been willed into being largely through Mr Broad's generosity. He helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) across the street in 1979, then bailed it out when it ran into serious financial trouble in 2008. And he helped get Frank Gehry's adjacent Walt Disney Concert Hall built when fund-raising stalled in the 1990s.
Having worked with a number of well-known architects, Mr Broad should have had the acumen to achieve greatness when he chose Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the...