IT WAS A CLEAR DAY , the kind where you can see forever. Especially if you’re standing on the airy terrace of Los Angeles’s Getty Center one mid-September morning. I’m here for the launch of the third iteration of Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time” program, newly rebranded into the far more keyword-searchable PST ART .
The 900-foot elevation, with its sweeping god’s-eye view, prompts a little excavation through a few layers of history. I’m here because, within his own lifetime, founding philanthropist J. Paul Getty pulled off some rare alchemy: He worked out how to turn Oil into Art.
His first big oil strike was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1916; by 1954, the prospector turned aesthete had opened a part of his Malibu home as a museum to showcase his collection of art and antiquities. Twenty years later, the cliffside Getty Villa—a mirror re-creation of a palace destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius—had been built to provide a permanent home for his now-immense hoard. Getty died in 1976, never seeing his vision completed, but he’s buried up there, forever overlooking the wide blue Pacific.
Getty’s own legacy perhaps provides the ur-narrative behind the powerful, pertinent theme chosen for PST’s 2024–25 edition: “Art & Science Collide.” As the pace of technology races past our abilities to comprehend it, art can communicate scientific ideas more effectively than any academic paper. With the Getty Foundation disbursing $20 million worth of grant funding.