Free Republic

In cities with wetter climes, storms are cautiously observed through windows. In droughty Los Angeles, they’re ogled in a museum. Rain Room, an exhibition that simulates a downpour indoors, opens at LACMA on November 1. The high-tech installation is immersive: Up to seven people at a time can walk through the 1,000-square-foot deluge without getting wet. British studio rAndom International, whose experiential projects explore human reaction and intuition as they relate to nature, created the work. Motion sensors and 3-D tracking cameras stop the flow of water whenever a human body is detected, imbuing the entire event with a divine...

Ignoring its duty to preserve art, the museum is about to allow the commissioned murals and panels in its garage to be destroyed. THIS YEAR, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has embarrassed itself by handing over gallery space to private corporations (the King Tut exhibition), and it has sold masterworks from its supposedly permanent collection (at auction last month in New York City). Now LACMA is about to destroy art. On Dec. 1, the museum will tear down its parking garage. The plan is to erect in its place a $60-million building for the display of contemporary art....

In its boldest collection-culling since 1982, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will sell off 42 artworks in November, including paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Max Beckmann, sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore, and works on paper by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. Sotheby's in New York will offer the works at auction Nov. 2 and 3 and expects them to bring in $10 million to $14 million. The headliner is a Modigliani, "Portrait of Manuel Humbert Esteve," that is expected to fetch $4 million to $6 million. The idea, said LACMA...

Just came back from the King Tut exhibit in LA. I saw the exhibit in '76, and have seen the Tut exhibit in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and have been to the Luxor Museum / Valley of Kings / Valley of Queens / Abu Simbel / etc. My girlfriend never saw any of the Tut exhibits before, so together we represent a wide range of pre-existing knowledge about Tut and about ancient Egypt. We both thought the LA exhibit, soon touring the USA, was a waste of time. The exhibit included no closely Tut-related paraphernalia bigger than a breadbox....