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But emblem or not, MOCA has had its share of troubles. It is lucky in its director: Koshalek, 45, formerly curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and director of the Fort Worth Art Museum, is a man of intelligence and voracious enthusiasm. However, not much in the way of bequests and gifts has yet reached MOCA. Some of its trustees, notably Robert Rowan, have given it good individual works. But so far only one collection has been donated: 64 works owned by the late Barry Lowen, a TV production executive whose tastes for minimal art, neoexpressionism and media-based "appropriation" imagery were much copied by new Los Angeles collectors before his death in 1985. There are few collectors of note among MOCA's 39 trustees, and none have promised their holdings to the museum -- not even Marcia Weisman, despite her role as founding mother. But Koshalek is convinced that MOCA's collections will fill out, and that his target of funding acquisitions with $10 million a year in gifts and raised money will be met. "Doing the Temporary Contemporary and Bunker Hill in four years left nothing over," he says. "But now that the museum is up, we can put the same push into building the collection -- and we will."
In 1984 MOCA announced with much fanfare that it had agreed to buy, for $11 million spread interest-free over six years, a group of works by Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Rothko and others from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Italian industrialist who was one of its trustees. Though it seems odd that a trustee could make a fortune by selling to his own institution, the deal was perfectly legal in California. "There's good self-dealing and bad self-dealing," says Director Koshalek philosophically. Then last November word leaked out that Count Panza's fellow trustees had discussed selling some of the works to raise the next $2 million installment. This too would have been legal -- there was no agreement to keep the collection intact -- but when the indignant count blew the story to the press, MOCA was seen as a museum that could sell part of its collection to pay for the rest before it had even opened. Such gestures make potential donors wary.
In any case, a recurrent dream of L.A.'s contemporary collectors is a museum of one's own. One could get much the same tax benefits by giving the stuff to LACMA or MOCA, but then the museum might choose to sell some off, suggesting that one's taste was . . . well, imperfect. Douglas Cramer, the TV producer who gave a grateful world Dynasty and The Love Boat, has turned his ranch and vineyard at Santa Ynes into an art foundation (even the bottles carry chaste line drawings of vine leaves by Ellsworth Kelly on their white labels; the artist made a special trip to draw Cramer's leaves in situ).