Pursuits
A Billionaire's Crusade to Make L.A. the Contemporary Art Capital of the World
- Eli Broad has campaigned, and spent, to make the city matter
- His $140 million contemporary-art museum opens Sunday
Inside Billionaire Eli Broad's New (Free) Museum
This article is for subscribers only.
Whenever Eli Broad went shopping, he’d do some selling. A multibillionaire who made his fortune in homebuilding and retirement funds, Broad would pick up a Koons or Kusama -- and make a pitch for Los Angeles.
At 82, Broad is a modern-day Medici, having devoted hundreds of millions to his singular, seemingly quixotic quest: to transform a sprawl of traffic and tabloid celebrity into a vital center for contemporary art rivaling New York or London. The culmination is a 120,000-square-foot museum bearing the Broad name, which opens Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The story behind it is about vision, money and power. And, as far as Broad’s concerned, success.