Art and Anxiety in Los Angeles

Six months after opening, the Getty Center, the $1 billion mountaintop museum that has become Los Angeles’s biggest cultural attraction, started running newspaper ads asking people not to come. Featuring a dozen happy kids from different races, the ads were headlined “It’s a full house.” They recommended that readers “check out L.A.’s other cultural attractions.” This came after a feverish outreach campaign aimed at L.A.’s minority and immigrant communities, with banners throughout the city proclaiming the new building to be “YOUR Getty.” This anxious effort had sought to persuade critics that the Getty was not, repeat not, an “elitist” institution.

The Getty outreach campaign is part of a major effort by museums throughout the country to attract a bigger and more diverse audience—the art world’s strategy for combating attacks by Jesse Helms and others on public funding for the arts. If more ordinary voters believe that the museums are their...