LACMA’s picture

Before pursuing a new director, LACMA needs an unflinching reality check [“Which Way, LACMA?,” June 12]. When the great American cities of the late 19th-early 20th centuries were buying art, Los Angeles was a one-horse town.

We must face the fact that our city, the second largest in the country, has a backwater museum built on mammoth bones and tar. We need a museum director who has friends in all the right places -- the great museums of the world -- who can use his or her standing to get those museums to include LACMA as a destination for any and every traveling exhibition going.

LACMA’s future is not in our permanent collection, our new plans for the buildings, or the hands of ego-driven collectors, but in other museums’ art. Rent it, borrow it, but get it here and do the public a real service simply by doing what museums have always done: put great art on display. A blockbuster is better than nothing.

Jamie Anderson

Glendale