Recap: Eli Broad's Museum Opens With Jeff Glitter,, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Pedestrians walk past the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, on Feb. 7, 2008. Photographer: Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg News

According to Bloomberg.com the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad has done the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a good turn. He gave it $50 million to build a special home for contemporary art -- and did it without sandbagging the institution with the burden of his overblown collection.

Major parts of Eli and Edythe Broad's private holdings, as well as their Broad Art Foundation, are now on loan to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), opening on the Lacma campus Saturday, Feb. 16.

As it happens, only a few of the pieces on view belong in a major museum.

They include Jasper Johns's seminal Stars and Stripes painting of 1967, ``Flag,'' Ellsworth Kelly's flying wedge of shaped canvas, ``Blue Red'' (1968), a Roy Lichtenstein comic- book painting (``I ... I'm Sorry'' from 1965-66), and an awesomely scaled sculpture of a kitchen table and chairs by Robert Therrien that dwarfs everyone who walks under it.

Other prizes by Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha either already belong to Lacma or are on loan from other people. That bodes well for the future of the museum.

Broad has a genuine enthusiasm for contemporary art, but he came late to the party in the 1980s, compelling him to pay big money for big names on the secondary market later, and buying, it seems, in bulk.

Installed on BCAM'S three floors mostly as a series of solo shows, the exhibition is chock-a-block with Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, one of the few women finding favor. Barbara Kruger produced an eye-popping, three-story text work for the central elevator shaft, stating that ``plenty should be enough.'' It is amusing in these circumstances.

Scattershot Hirst

Looking like the attic of a particularly eccentric personality is a scattershot group of works by Damien Hirst (including one sheep in formaldehyde and a large glass cabinet with a robot technician peering into a microscope).

Elsewhere are a few diverting time capsules of '80s art stars like Julian Schnabel, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl.

The show is really just a big thank you to a generous patron. With more than enough star power to please the public, it doesn't really need to be anything else.

A year from now, the works will rotate out and the museum's curatorial staff will use the travertine-clad building, designed by Renzo Piano (another Broad selection), to greater historical advantage.

For now, you're sunk if you come hoping to understand more about the art of our time. This theme park of a show is less about art than what money can buy.

Koons Effect

For Broad, it seems, that means Koons.

Sculpture and painting by this commerce-obsessed conceptualist dominate the blue-chip works on the top floor. Those fluorescently lit Plexiglas crypts of Hoover vacuum cleaners command a large central area, basking in natural light filtering through the glass ceiling.

His $3.5 million red stainless-steel ``Cracked Egg'' is here, along with his kitschy ceramic ``Michael Jackson and Bubbles,'' his stainless-steel cast of an inflatable toy ``Rabbit,'' and a trio of hideous, computer-derived paintings.

Shunted to one side, in a corridor dimmed by a rooftop overhang, are significant paintings by Andy Warhol, without whom Koons probably couldn't exist. The rude arrangement makes Koons out to be father to the man.

In the context of a museum with important collections of Asian and Latin-American art and artifacts, and an increasingly rich cache of modern works, this presents a very vexing view of art history.

Yet there are more pluses than minuses attached to BCAM's existence in Los Angeles.

For one thing, the interior space is sensibly scaled and quiet, without the usual distractions of smelly cafes and gift shops. And, for the moment, it puts on constant view artworks that are otherwise accessible only by invitation to Broad's home or foundation.

Excessive as it is, the show gives BCAM a high-flying start.