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Don your pith helmet and bullshit waders and follow me, gentle readers, into the jungle of the feral rich—a.k.a. downtown Los Angeles, where Eli Broad, the biggest art-accumulating billionaire, will soon open his own robber-baron-style museum. The eponymous facility—no Oz-like reveries of transparent suspension structures for this mogul—will house Eli and Edythe Broad’s two-thousand-piece collection. It will also, of course, double as an agitprop advertisement for its namesake’s philanthropic career as one of the nation’s leading privatizers of public education.
The so-called school reform agenda of the Broad Foundation, like the Walton family fortune, exemplifies the race to the bottom for everyone except the “honorific exploiters.” Eli Broad, one of the richest art philanthropists in America (worth $6.9 billion as estimated by the “Forbes wealth team”; go wealth!), has been described as a “venture philanthropist . . . who wants to see results.” And the results he likes best are naturally of the quid pro quo variety. “Eli’s middle name is ‘Strings Attached,’” Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight told Morley Safer in a 60 Minutes profile of the accountant turned art accumulator.
The strings attached to Broad’s own fortune, unsurprisingly, are deeply entwined with the worst elements of the 2008 meltdown; one of his companies, SunAmerica, was sold to AIG in 1999. As Artnet noted after the 60 Minutes profile aired, Broad’s $2 billion philanthropic empire sprang from the early-aughts feeding frenzy in “cheap housing and insurance . . . two vast industries that soak the lower and middle classes at their most vulnerable.” Thus engorged, the Broad Foundation (with its allies the Gates Foundation and, yes, the Walton Family Foundation) dabbles in social engineering and transfers public resources into private coffers by replacing public schools with market-based charters. The Broad Foundation, in short, is underwriting an ever-spreading fiefdom of teach-to-the-test mills that squelch the creative potential of the non-rich and hollow out the teaching profession into micro-managed, low-paid dronehood.
But lo, the patrician hand of art washes all these contradictions away. The hard-hitting investigative producers of 60 Minutes, who reverently focused on Broad’s $1.6 billion art collection, declared: “There is no one quite so civic minded in America.”
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