Photo of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, from www.you-are-here.com

As with almost everything else, the news in contemporary art hasn’t been good lately. The biggest bad story concerns the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). Housed in an elegant Arata Isozaki building (it opened in 1986) and considered one of the best of its kind in the world, it’s teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Jeremy Strick, a respected curator who came from the Art Institute of Chicago to be the director of MOCA in 1999, is negotiating some way to leave his post with dignity — and maybe a little change in his pocket.

During Strick’s tenure, MOCA mounted a string of big, important exhibitions, but it also hemorrhaged money. Dipping into its endowment to pay operating expenses — a no-no in practically any organization — MOCA saw the principle shrivel from $50-million a decade ago to a mere $6-million today. Without a rescue (known everywhere else but in the art world as a bailout), the museum won’t survive.

White knights being considered are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, aka LACMA (sorry for the acronyms — more are coming — but art museums are addicted to them), which is offering a takeover (um, “merger,”), and philanthropist Eli Broad, who offers a $30-million lifeline contingent on other donors ponying up $15-mil in matching funds. Much of Broad’s own collection resides in a Renzo Piano addition to LACMA’s campus called the BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum.) The one possibility no one will consider out loud is to let the museum fail. To Angelenos, that would be a major cultural kick in the teeth. To the contemporary art world, it’d look like the first domino.

Since our last major recession in the early 1970s, major American cities with serious art ambitions have proudly built glamorous new spaces that show world-class contemporary art. In addition to L.A.’s MOCA, the list includes, among others, the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art (this time just MCA) in Chicago, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston, and the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. These showplaces didn’t come cheap; their architects include the likes of Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid.

These and other contemporary art museums have been built not only to accommodate great big paintings and sculpture (contemporary painters and sculptors are enamored of acres of cotton canvas and tons of materiel) but also the floor-space-voracious installation and video-projection art that’s become the norm for even half-heartedly ambitious artists. Of course, for every lovingly small work by Memling or Van Eyck in a museum of older art, there’s a super-sized Rubens or Frederick Church.

But from Abstract Expressionism on, what some call “the WOW effect” has prevailed. Large art by Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Takashi Murakami, Jenny Saville, Diana Thater, Thomas Hirschhorn, et al., is the favored fare of contemporary art museums — and the kind of collectors who sit on the boards of contemporary art museums. Yet unless accompanied by a scandal (as was the case with dung in a painting of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 exhibition, Sensation, contemporary exhibitions in contemporary art museums hardly ever attract the kinds of crowds that blockbuster art-historical shows do.

Here’s the point: Contemporary art of the sort that rises from the galleries of New York, L.A., London and Continental capitals is essentially a niche market. Relatively few people really “get” it or even give a damn about it, and the only time it attracts much of a lay audience is when it deliberately morphs into accessible public art, e.g., Christo’s Central Park “Gates” a few years ago. But cities have bought into the idea that contemporary art is colorful, spectacular, and attracts “cultural tourism” dollars to their tax coffers.

And sure enough, the slick new edifices designed by “starchitects” attract a lot of people. But soon the novelty wears off, and attendance reverts to the small cadre of culturati that prowls the galleries, busfuls of school kids, and a few walk-ins. In short, contemporary-art museums and their promoters have overreached. And just as the crisis with the Big Three automakers isn’t simply a matter of them getting caught in a credit crunch, but is a matter of them offering products that people want to buy only when the economy is puffed up and people can throw their money around, the crisis at MOCA is a matter of contemporary art museums being popular — or financially viable — only in the same circumstance.

MOCA’s problems expose the vulnerability of cultural institutions that ignore the limitations of their audience, and overreach. Adhering to the Super Size Me diet of contemporary art has fed a desire for vast caverns of big art that in turn encourages artists to make more big art, which in turn creates a “necessity” for even more capacious contemporary art museums, and so on.

A relatively small group of dealers, curators, rich collectors, artists, and critics still decide what matters or doesn’t matter in contemporary art. Contemporary art of the sort exhibited at MOCA, the CAM, the MCA and the ICA and elsewhere is ultimately more like jazz than rock and roll. Its nature is esoteric, and even though current convention has led to huge art and huge venues, change things the least little bit, and that might no longer be the case. In terms of audience, contemporary art — whether it’s lilliputian or brobdingnagian — will never fill seats in a stadium. The general public doesn’t care much about contemporary art except as a lark, and in tough times like now, they’re not inclined to shell out money to buy tickets merely to see larks.

Would it really be so terrible if MOCA were to close its doors, or be folded into LACMA? Once the city got over the shame of losing a big-time museum — just like it got over the shame (as my husband points out to me) of losing two professional football teams (currently, Los Angeles has none), a new, retrenched, more reasonably sized contemporary art world might prosper. A strict low-calorie diet composed of common sense mixed together with economic pragmatism, forced on ailing contemporary art museums, might be just what the doctor should order.