The Broad Museum recently opened in downtown Los Angeles—a monumental project that completes the stretch known, appropriately, as Grand Avenue:  a boulevard at the upper-reaches of a downtown that is anchored by a number of super-expensive projects:  Disney Concert Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Colburn School, and the Los Angeles Public Library.

It’s one of those impressive wonders—one created by some famous cutting-edge architect—and it is the final lego that makes the area a truly walkable stretch where visitors can stroll and dine and get themselves a little bit of culture.

The Broad Museum is the brainchild of Eli Broad, the real estate developer who made a name for himself collecting postmodern art.  And it is a gift to the city that he has changed with his jackhammers and dynamite.

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg—you can find them all represented in the opening collection.  These are the artists who came into national prominence in the champagne era of the price-inflated 80’s…when art was less about aesthetic value and more a matter of speculation.  This is not to say that this kind of art is not beautiful or interesting but that, for the masses and the one percent, art achieved a value because it cost a shit-ton of money and everybody knew it because money talks and bullshit walks.

The location of the Broad Museum is fitting.  Grand Avenue sits on Bunker Hill—a corner of the city that saw in its early hey-day some of the grandest Victorian homes in the metropolis–homes when rich people wanted to stay close to the city center.  Bunker HIll was a bunker of the extremely well-to-do, the preserve of the rich–a purely residential area–that slowly became a slum, a place when developers like Eli Broad made this a city of sprawl.

In its decline, LA writers like John Fante could get his first digs in a sub-divided rooming house.  Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe made this dreary outpost of the city center a part of the noir landscape.  And movies exploited the location–a location that was sad by the time it hit its stride into the flop house mid-century–and transformed it into the site of the seedy, the debauched. Bunker Hill was a fleabag poodle with a satin ribbon.

In the middle of the mid-century, Bunker Hill was razed.  And the first of the grand civic projects that would give Grand Avenue its capitalized Grand Name burst like a prima ballerina onto the scene: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Los Angeles Opera House.  Now, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is the grand old dame on the avenue—like a faded beauty in rustling crinolines who sits with a glass of sherry in her parlor reading the obituaries with a magnifying glass.  The opera house was the brainchild of its namesake, the wife of the Los Angeles Times newspaper magnate.  And it was hatched because Los Angeles was still a backwater—a backwater that needed to show it was a world class city among truly worldclass cities.

This is a long way of saying that the city suffered from an inferiority complex.  And this inferiority complex was not unlike the rest of the country’s inferiority complex vis a vis Europe:  America the Beautiful may have come into its own as an industrial complex but it was not a cultural super-power and so it remained still a second class citizen—like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman in her early-hooker-phase (before she becomes a legitimate consort to Richard Gere) who is snubbed by the shop girls in Beverly Hills.  And so these large civic projects, built upon a slippery slope that was demolished, stood on shaky ground:  the first, as well as the most recent civic projects, represented a chest-puffing, chauvinist pride in the city that masked the insecurity of a child who has grown large and swollen and powerful but who still remembers being bullied.

Critics have for the most part panned The Broad Museum.  The curation is still in its infancy and the infant museum has not yet figured out its point of view.  So, it looks very much like the display of a child who shows his very best marbles to his friends on the school yard.  They haven’t begun to ask deeper questions—philosophical questions—like “what exactly is a marble?” or “what will marbles look like in the future?” or “why do some of my marbles look like my other marbles?” or “what value do marbles give us as collectors and lovers of marbles?”

By the time I sidled up in line, I had heard all the snarky reviews by trained professionals on NPR.  And it incensed me.  So, I went to the museum (which is free just like the Met in New York) to vindicate poor Eli Broad, who spent half a lifetime collecting, and a significant portion of his fortune, housing his tribute to a time period that not only saw the rise of great art but also great supermodels.

Unfortunately, I got a terrible case of the runs.  And I found myself scrambling off to the bathroom after a whirlwind tour of the galleries (which were truly magnificent but truly empty of concept) and I found myself in the loo in a stall trying to relieve myself.  And I must say:   this was the best part of the museum.

The bathrooms are excellent—civilized and self-enclosed—no outsiders can peek through cracks.  Each stall is your own for the moment you use it.  And this is the closest the Broad comes to the example of the most civilized nations of Europe.