Great art museums are in part about the beautiful display of money: dearly acquired works shown in costly surroundings. By that standard, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is among the greatest. It occupies a Richard Meier-designed campus of Italian travertine high in the Santa Monica Mountains. It husbands a $5 billion-plus endowment. With that war chest--the legacy of oil mogul J. Paul Getty, who died in 1976--it built in a few decades a collection that would have taken another museum generations.
Now the Getty is getting attention for the kinds of spending that museums don't brag about. Next...
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