Why MAGA loves Art Deco

Before we get to Spencer Pratt and the unlikely appearance in the L.A. mayor’s race of calls for an Art Deco revival, some exciting news:

The first Punch List live event will be coming to Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, June 7!

It’s a collaboration with two terrific media outlets, Los Angeles Review of Architecture (a spinoff of New York Review of Architecture with two issues under its belt) and the news site L.A. Material, which was founded by the L.A. Times vets Julia Turner and Julia Wick, among others.

The event, “A LACMA Therapy Session,” will offer Angelenos a chance, in a lively public forum, to process their VERY complicated feelings about Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, now that the building is finally open. It will take place beginning at 4pm on June 7 at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, an auditorium practically in the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.

Aside from yours truly, the lineup includes L.A. Material’s Antonia Cereijido; Carolina A. Miranda, the arts and culture journalist whose review of DGG, for Bloomberg, was one of my favorites; the L.A. architect Frederick Fisher, who has designed museum projects from Oceanside, Calif., to Waterville, Maine; Jimenez Lai, of the L.A. design studio Bureau Spectacular; and NYRA’s (and LARA’s) editor, Samuel Medina, fresh from a National Magazine Award victory. We’ll also be featuring the remarkable L.A. photographer Janna Ireland, who will show new pictures she’s made of the Zumthor building.

The goal isn’t to decide, once and for all, whether the new wing is brilliant or terrible. It’s to consider a range of responses to what easily ranks as the most polarizing work of architecture to appear in Los Angeles this century.

Ahead of June 7 we’re collecting public responses to the Zumthor building in written (and perhaps also in audio and video) form. We’ll share some of these during the event, in the spirit of communal venting and vox populi. If you want to have your take on the building included, please email it to [email protected], with the subject line LACMA. We’d be very happy to receive it, whether or not you can join us at the event. The only requirement is that you’ve visited the David Geffen Galleries.

Tickets are $15 for the general public and just $5 for paid subscribers to Punch List or one of our co-presenters. We’ll have a reception outdoors after the show.

You can find all the details and a link to get your tickets here.

Hope to see all of you on June 7!

And now on to our weekly dispatch:

In the summer of 2023, not long after buying Twitter and rebranding it as X, Elon Musk posted this message to his followers: “If X is closest to anything, it should, of course, be Art Deco.” (It’s the “of course” that really gets me—as if the pairing of a famously toxic social network and a century-old design style should be self-evident!) A year later he released a prototype for a Tesla Robovan that looked a lot like a Deco toaster on wheels.

In recent weeks, the L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who went to Crossroads with Jonah Hill before becoming a blond villain on the MTV reality show “The Hills,” and last year lost his house to the Palisades fire, has been sprinkling references to Art Deco into the podcast appearances that his campaign is using in lieu of interviews with legacy news outlets. His press office, shockingly, didn’t respond to requests for comment this week from Punch List.

First came a conversation with Meghan Daum, for her podcast “Unspeakeasy.” (Daum, along with Caitlin Flanagan, is one of a handful of L.A. journalists who have begun gushing about Pratt; in a piece for the Atlantic that is as clueless about politics as it is about L.A. history, Daum endorsed Pratt as “the factory-reset option in the mayoral race.”) Pratt, sitting in front of an Airstream trailer on his burned-out Palisades lot, told her for the podcast that much of L.A. could be razed to make room for new development aimed at bringing the city “to Dubai levels.”