Finery

If you google “cultural things to do in Los Angeles”, the search engine will attempt to oblige you but struggle to suggest anything classier than a Universal Studios tour or the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However the one thing it can recommend with certainty is a visit to the Getty museum, so I went there to see what all the fuss it about.

The fuss is warranted. The Getty is one of the wealthiest art museums in the world, and unlike other galleries across the planet, which are housed in converted palazzos, stately homes or industrial buildings, it has a purpose-built campus that is nothing short of stunning. Perched on a mountainside overlooking Brentwood and Bel-Air, it’s a $1.3 billion palace of travertine marble and glass walls, bubbling modernist fountains, and exquisitely curated and manicured gardens. Walking around it felt like being given access to a supervillian’s lair… which in a way isn’t too far from the truth.

The actual galleries themselves are filled with 14^th century illuminated manuscripts, 16^th century religious icons, 17^th century carved ivory, 18^th century still lifes, and 19^th and 20^th century masterpieces by Van Gogh, Pissaro, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Munch.

Here’s a selection of images that I call Notable Pissed Off Faces of Great Art.

Those last two are from a work I like to call ‘The Denunciation'. Whereas The Annunciation was about heralding the birth of our Saviour, the Denunciation is about getting that bitch Sharon in trouble with HR.

But the Getty is vast, so even though I arrived as it opened and stayed almost until it closed, I only saw about half of it. Excess is, in art as with everything else, as American as apple pie.