Dance, Real Estate, and Institutional Critique: Reconsidering Glorya Kaufman’s Dance Philanthropy in Los Angeles

Introduction

Glorya Kaufman, a philanthropist with a keen interest in dance, has given significant financial resources in recent years to dance institutions in Los Angeles. In 2012, she donated funding to the University of Southern California (USC) to establish a new dance department, including $46 million to build the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center, opening in the fall of 2016. With this funding, USC’s new dance school appointed prominent contemporary ballet choreographer William Forsythe as artistic adviser. This came on the heels of major donations to the University of California, Los Angeles (an $18 million gift to restore the dance building, which amounted to the largest individual arts donation in UC history) as well as $20 million to the Los Angeles Music Center to fund performances by touring dance companies. A fortune amassed by her late husband, who died in 1983, underpins these recent allocations of dance funding. Along with Eli Broad, Donald Bruce Kaufman co-founded Kaufman & Broad (now known as the Fortune 500 company KB Home) in 1957, which builds housing subdivisions in the United States and abroad. In the case of Glorya Kaufman, the revenue generated through unleashing tract housing later becomes major funding for contemporary dance in Los Angeles.

Upon entering the luminous dance studios at USC and UCLA, one might appreciate Kaufman’s support for dance as a medium. Her generosity provides spaces for harnessing the possibilities inherent in dance for celebration, healing, and community building. She offers opportunities for a diverse group of dance artists—some world-renown, some emerging—to hone their craft and create meaningful work. While one can find many reasons to laud her advocacy for dance, I approach Kaufman’s philanthropy through a simple question: where did the money come from? In contradistinction to the heroic narrative of the generous patron, the beautiful dance center, and the strong, lithe dancers jumping towards excellence, I consider the material mechanisms that made these “gifts” possible.

Glorya Kaufman’s dance patronage offers a case to chart the relation between concert dance and capital accumulation and to consider how dance patronage might function to legitimate real estate development. I contextualize Kaufman’s philanthropy within the processes that generated her wealth and the economic role that suburbanization has played in the postwar United States context. A Marxist analysis of Kaufman’s philanthropy illuminates the dynamics of capitalist generosity, as it transmutes processes of exploitation into acts of giving. I point not towards Kaufman’s personal generosity or selfishness, but to how the structural relations of capitalism shape arts institutions. Far from a simple act of generosity, her patronage functions to “art wash” regimes of real estate speculation.¹ Patronage allows profiteering to become re-figured as altruistic support of dancerly grace. De-obscuring the source of Kaufman’s wealth shows us how concert dance funding is bound up in the history of suburbanization, white flight, and urban redevelopment in the Southern Californian context. While institutional critique within dance may appear ill-advised considering how little funding supports concert dance, I hope that charting the connections between dance and real estate can help dancers to soberly consider what made this capital accumulation possible and who benefits from these gifts.

Examining the financial sources of Kaufman’s philanthropy presents an occasion think expansively about the politics of concert dance. In approaching questions of politics, dance scholarship often investigates the construction of identity within movement practices or finds within dance forms of collective resistance and resilience, while side-stepping the concrete material circumstances at play.² Critical inquiry into dance patronage can reexamine the autonomy traditionally claimed by dance as an art form, as distanced from commercial, erotic, and social dance. Dance as an aesthetic practice usually holds three claims to autonomy: economic autonomy (dancing as separate from the pursuit of profit), social autonomy (dance as a specialized field, distinct from every day, amateur practices), and political autonomy (dance as a form of unfettered expression).³ Detailing sources of funding for dance can show the limits of these forms of autonomy, as economic interests crucially constrain concert dance. Private patronage in the arts can have various material functions: a) it reflects a stake in the speculative value of art works, b) donations come at opportune moments to distract from nefarious business practices and promote the public image of corporations, c) patrons utilize cultural institutions as tax havens, or d) patronage functions as a means to exert control over urban centers. This last line of inquiry becomes important for thinking about Glorya Kaufman and her Los Angeles context.

Approaches to Cultural Patronage

Informed by the gesture of institutional critique, I offer a critical account of Kaufman’s philanthropy, connecting her giving to the history of Kaufman & Broad’s mass production of housing subdivisions. Contrasting a Bourdieuian interpretation of art patronage, my argument stems from a Marxist framework. Bourdieu casts philanthropy as a means for members of a dominant class to accumulate symbolic capital in the form of prestige and recognition.⁴ While patrons certainly champion their own symbolic legacy, I argue that what appears as generosity emerges from the drives of capital accumulation more narrowly. While Bourdieu offers insight into the social distinction sought by patrons, a Marxist framework illuminates the material conditions that allowed them to accumulate their wealth. Support for concert dance is distinct from museum patronage as presenting dance does not offer the possibility of financial return that art objects do. For this reason, I focus on the financial relationships between dance institutions and real estate speculation.

While art historians and cultural critics have analyzed Eli Broad’s philanthropy, dance researchers have not yet examined Glorya Kaufman’s donations.⁵ Within critical conversations about the politics of dance patronage, previous scholars have explored the forms of private funding that supported influential choreographers and the political processes involved in public patronage for modern dance in the United States.⁶ I see this analysis of Kaufman’s patronage as contributing to what dance historian Sally Banes refers to as “critical institutional studies,” which she views as influenced by developments in other fields including institutional critique in the visual arts and the rise of museum studies.⁷ While Banes notes how the impetus to examine the infrastructure of dance stems from the tradition of materialist art criticism, dance scholars have yet to write any patronage studies that take up a Marxist frame.⁸ Previous research has not inquired about the sources of capital accumulation that became patronage or critically examined the economic function these donations might have for the funders. For example, Lynn Garafola’s engagement with patrons is largely celebratory and untroubled by the broader conditions of capitalist accumulation.⁹ Building upon previous investigations of funding for dance, the analysis I pursue here foregrounds a critique of the economic relations that ensconce concert dance.¹⁰

Patronage studies in other fields have analyzed the social and economic functions of private cultural funding.¹¹ In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, INCITE! offers a materialist account, asserting that private foundations operate as tax shelters and “allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic’ work.”¹² Ruth Wilson Gilmore astutely argues that private “foundations are repositories of twice-stolen wealth—a) profit sheltered from b) taxes—that can be retrieved by those who stole it at the opera or the museum, at Harvard or a fine medical facility.”¹³ Gilmore’s view of philanthropy is rooted within Marxist political economy, an economic framework that understands profit itself as a form of theft. Mainstream or neoclassical economics posit capitalism as a benign system of exchange in which financial rewards go to those with innovative thinking, entrepreneurial cunning, and an appetite for risk. In contrast, Marxian economics views profit, or “surplus-value,” as originating in the exploitation of labor-power. Capitalism’s emergence and rise to global dominance rest upon violent processes of primitive accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation, as George Caffentzis describes:

Capitalism did not start as the result of the realization that trading commodities is a “win-win” exchange, but as a series of acts of violent expropriation and enslavement in many sites across the planet. This violence made it possible to accumulate the initial mass of laboring bodies required for the endangered ruling classes of Western Europe to begin a cycle of exploitation that has lasted to this day.¹⁴

When viewed through this lens, private philanthropy takes on a different tenor as a tool of the capitalist class to buttress their economic and political power. Tracking how Glorya Kaufman came to possess her wealth allows us to chart the connections between concert dance, capital accumulation, and land use struggles.

History of Kaufman & Broad

To understand where Kaufman’s wealth comes from, we must begin in Detroit where Glorya grew up and Kaufman & Broad was founded. The daughter of Eva and Samuel Pinkis, Glorya Pinkis was born into a working class Jewish family in 1930.¹⁵ In 1954, Glorya married Donald Kaufman (1922–1983), a fellow Detroit native of Russian Jewish descent who became a general contractor.¹⁶ The couple earned a modest living, which Glorya contributed to by working as a bookkeeper for a medical clinic. Also in 1954, Glorya Kaufman’s cousin, Edythe Lawson, married Eli Broad (born 1933), the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who had become a young accountant.¹⁷ After being fired from his first job and determined to forge a new venture, Broad found Kaufman’s trade as a contractor intriguing. He speculated that the postwar generation would create a surge in demand for single family homes.¹⁸ In 1957, Broad went into business with Kaufman, contributing his accounting skills to Kaufman’s experience as a homebuilder. For their first endeavor, Kaufman and Broad borrowed $25,000 from Morris Lawson (Glorya’s uncle) to construct two model homes in a suburb northeast of Detroit.¹⁹ Kaufman & Broad developed a business model that centered on reducing the input expenses of building houses for the lower end of the market. As their chief cost saving mechanism, they built houses without basements. Broad describes the thinking behind this decision:

The first bit of conventional wisdom that my homebuilding partner, Don Kaufman, and I encountered was the firm belief that no one in Detroit would buy a house without a basement. We asked, “Why not?” The answer produced our first big idea: no basements… Basements had historically been the place to store coal to heat your home for the winter. New gas heating eliminated the need to stockpile coal, so basements weren’t a necessity.²⁰

In addition to eliminating basements, they used inexpensive building materials, swapped the garage for a carport, removed architects’ fees by designing the layout themselves, and developed an accelerated construction schedule that was four weeks faster than their competitors. They approached home-building not as real estate development but as a manufacturing business, “turning the single-family residence into a mass commodity like any other.”²¹ With careful attention to the methods of credit, Broad developed a financing structure that kept mortgage payments lower than the average rents, creating a financial incentive for residents to buy rather than rent. Kaufman & Broad compensated for low prices with increased volume, becoming profitable largely through economies of scale. Kaufman & Broad exemplified a distinct type of developer, a merchant builder who built whole “communities” and integrated the tasks of “land purchase, site improvement, construction, and merchandising together in a single firm.”²² Pioneering their model in Michigan, they began developing subdivisions in Arizona in 1960 and California in 1963, becoming a major purveyor of suburbanization in the American west. Relocating to Los Angeles, Kaufman & Broad emerged as the largest homebuilder in California over the course of the 1960s, soon expanding their tract housing business into international markets.²³ The company was the first housing producer listed on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time of Kaufman’s death in 1983, they held more than $1 billion in assets.²⁴ Kaufman & Broad combined two forms of capital accumulation, relative surplus value and land rent extraction, to amass this fortune.²⁵

While Kaufman & Broad used their cunning acumen to maximize profits, they also emerged at a moment when structural forces coalesced to support suburban development on a mass scale. David Harvey argues that the capitalist class used postwar suburbanization to inhibit an over-accumulation crisis.²⁶ The construction of new housing developments and its attendant structure of consumption provided a way to utilize excess capital:

The dilemmas of potential over accumulation which faced the US in 1945 were in part resolved through a suburbanization process which created new modes of living in accordance with the needs of capital accumulation. Furthermore, individualized homeownership promoted via a credit system which encourages debt encumbrance, is hardly neutral in relation to class struggle.²⁷

Capital used suburban housing development and its accompanying infrastructure to fill the role that the war industries had previously played in absorbing economic surplus and staving off crisis. In Harvey’s analysis of the social logic accompanying suburbanization, the ruling class prevented social unrest through the spread of indebtedness and an identification with the defense of property values. Following the class warfare of the 1930s, capital struck a bargain with labor, partly through the promise of the single family home for dutiful workers. In the emergent postwar geographic reorganization, capital used private home ownership as a basis for social cohesion.²⁸ For this reason, the success and scale of Kaufman & Broad’s business in part relied on the structural needs of capital in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II as housing provision became one of the means by which capital dealt with its internal contradictions.

Kaufman & Broad sold tract housing, but they also trafficked in American fantasies and fears. In Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson describes suburbia as “both a planning type and a state of mind based on imagery and symbolism.”²⁹ The ideology of suburban development connected home-ownership to social status and “a kind of sublime insurance against ill fortune.”³⁰ Feminist historian Dolores Hayden sees within the suburb a set of longings—for upward mobility, economic security, individual autonomy, and social harmony—as well as the gendered ideology of female domesticity and male home ownership.³¹ Robert Fishman describes the lure of the suburb as predicated on a logic of exclusion:

suburbia embodies a new ideal of family life, an ideal so emotionally charged that it made the home more sacred to the bourgeoisie than any place of worship . . . . Yet this “utopia” was always at most a partial paradise, a refuge not only from threatening elements in the city but also from discordant elements in bourgeois society itself. From its origins, the suburban world of leisure, family life, and union with nature was based on the principle of exclusion.³²

These bourgeois utopias exclude all industry, allowing residents to spatially dissociate from the world of capital and work into a fantasy of neighborly leisure.

Racial exclusion also played an equally salient role in the process of postwar suburbanization. In Eric Avila’s illuminating analysis, suburbanization crucially contributed to the process of white racial formation, with space functioning as a means to codify racial identity.³³ Avila views the term ‘white flight’ as a misnomer, as the process of moving to the suburbs helped to consolidate whiteness as a racial category. He argues that the socio-spatial order emerging in the postwar period sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography. Whiteness, as opposed to a smattering of distinct European ethnicities, became the product of suburbanization and its logic of racial exclusion. An inclusive white identity, in distinction to the concentration of racial otherness in urban centers, became a consequence of suburbia, which Avila understands as having lasting effects: “the spatial reorganization of the American city gave rise to a new racial awareness that, for better or for worse, still grips our collective imagination.”³⁴ The values embedded within suburbia—homogeneity, containment, predictability—correspond to the emptying out of distinct ethnic identities that is characteristic of whiteness. The success and scale of Kaufman & Broad’s business depended upon and fueled these larger patterns concerning the racial politics of space in the postwar context.

In the prologue to his seminal City of Quartz, urban historian Mike Davis uses the gated communities manufactured by Kaufman & Broad in Southern California’s Antelope Valley as a central metaphor for the banal, dystopian sprawl indicative of the Los Angeles landscape, in what he terms “the eutopia (literally no-place) logic of their [Kaufman & Broad’s] subdivisions, in sterilized sites stripped bare of nature and history, masterplanned only for privatized family consumption.”³⁵ Kaufman & Broad, through their aggressive rationalization of suburban homebuilding, made a fortune through peddling spatial homogeneity and tedium. Although he died at the age of 60 in a biplane crash, Donald Kaufman left the spoils of this fortune within trusts that name his wife as the beneficiary.³⁶ One can infer the scope of Glorya Kaufman’s current net worth by examining the amount of money she gives away freely.

Glorya Kaufman’s Dance Philanthropy

I turn now to Glorya Kaufman’s activity as a dance philanthropist, unfolding the social and aesthetic logic of her decisions. Beginning in the late 1990s, Kaufman has poured millions into concert dance in Los Angeles and New York City, including $6 million to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and $3.5 million to the Juilliard School.³⁷ She centers her philanthropic activity in Los Angeles, where she has lived since 1963.

Kaufman’s largest donations have gone to dance institutions in LA, beginning with the $18 million she gave to UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture in 1999. Dance Magazine’s Pamela Diamond referred to Kaufman’s gift to renovate UCLA’s dance building as “the largest of its kind in American dance.”³⁸ Built in 1932 as a women’s gymnasium and housing UCLA’s dance department since 1962, the hall’s renovation was completed in 2004, financed by Kaufman’s donation along with additional federal funds that together amounted to a $35 million budget.³⁹

Observing Kaufman’s role at UCLA reveals two of her predilections as a philanthropist: her desire to exert aesthetic control and her privileging of balletic/modern dance technical prowess as a barometer for dance education. Kaufman adopted a “hands-on,” or more accurately top-down, approach to the UCLA building, which she described to the Los Angeles Times: “I picked out every color and every chair and the wood.”⁴⁰ A former UCLA undergraduate remembers that Kaufman made large x‘s in permanent marker on any piece of marble that was not white enough, demanding their replacement. She forbid the department to tape any posters to the walls, so that the hallways would remain pristinely empty. As a final flourish, she had a bas relief sculpture of herself as a young dancer installed in the building’s outdoor courtyard. Kaufman told the New York Times that exerting control over design decisions makes funding projects worthwhile for her: “I don’t do anything unless I’m involved, because that’s no fun. And besides, they’re using my name. I better like it! So I’m going to be part of the design of the building and the curriculum.”⁴¹ For Kaufman, philanthropy means exercising her own cultural taste.

The irony of UCLA’s Kaufman Hall is that architects designed the building for a dance program and performance series that did not exist. UCLA had created a dance department in 1962, yet because of a decrease in arts funding in the 1990s, the program had folded into the World Arts and Cultures department in 1995.⁴² Originally named “Ethnic Arts,” faculty from six departments created World Arts and Cultures in 1972 in response to student struggles demanding a non-Eurocentric arts curriculum.⁴³ The WAC department offers classes in numerous non-western dance forms, and the faculty have an experimental and postmodern orientation. Kaufman’s attempt to create a dance school focused on conservatory training in modern and ballet chafed against the priorities of the existing department. Kaufman’s building includes a 274-seat dance theater, an 89-seat black box theater, a garden pavilion theater, and a box office, which she intended as facilities for robust dance programming. In reporting on the building’s renovation, Victoria Looseleaf and Allan Ullrich described the lack of infrastructure for utilizing Kaufman Hall as a dance presenter: “programming works other than student-faculty fare poses an immediate challenge. Christopher Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, says that no endowment currently exists for such fare, and that it might take a year to determine how community needs could be integrated with UCLA’s use of the building.”⁴⁴ The building’s box office has rarely been used. In speaking with the New York Times, Kaufman was reticent to speak about her displeasure with UCLA: “I don’t like to talk about it. Let’s just say I was disappointed with U.C.L.A. They weren’t able to realize my vision. They couldn’t have a B.F.A. [program]. That really tells it all.”⁴⁵ Within Kaufman’s desire for a BFA program lies a vision of dance education defined by athleticism and technical competence in western concert forms. While Kaufman has not stated why she has a vested interest in a BFA, we might infer that ballet and modern dance represent to her more socially elevated and prestigious dance genres.

Following her disappointment with UCLA, Kaufman shifted her focus to USC, a university that did not have a dance department. In November 2012, she gave USC an undisclosed sum to fund a new conservatory-style dance program, which Kaufman intended as a “Juilliard of the West.”⁴⁶ Much of this funding went to the construction of a new $46 million building, the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. To direct the program, the school hired Jodie Gates, a former dancer with the Joffrey and Frankfurt Ballets who had taught at UC Irvine. William Forsythe agreed to teach on campus for six weeks each academic year. The new department ushered in its first students in 2015, and the building opened in 2016. Branding the department as “The New Movement,” Kaufman’s school adopts a post-Fordist image of the dancer. Gates describes the program’s intent “to breed the next generation of hybrid artists—creators, innovators, entrepreneurs.”⁴⁷ No longer training to dance simply in a ballet corps or established repertory company, USC conceptualizes dancers as abiding with a capitalist logic of entrepreneurial innovation. Yet to become these hybrid, interdisciplinary artists, students must pay the private university tuition, currently $55,320 for the 2018–2019 academic year. Dean Robert Cutietta describes the Kaufman School as “not overly generous” with scholarships.⁴⁸ The USC department offers proximity to prestige in dance to students willing to stomach an exorbitant amount of student debt or those with parents who can foot the bill.

What exactly draws Kaufman to dance? She has never studied ballet or modern dance, preferring to pick up social dances such as the tango, the quickstep, and the cha-cha.⁴⁹ Kaufman has stated that she always wanted to be a dancer, but her family lacked the money for lessons when she was a child.⁵⁰ Her tastes are not especially avant-garde: she loves the televised dance competition So You Think You Can Dance and never misses an episode.⁵¹ Kaufman conceptualizes dance as a conduit for happiness and edifying character development: “This is something that brings joy, and I don’t think we have enough of it [ . . .] It gives you self-esteem, posture. You know how to walk into a room.”⁵² Kaufman understands dance as capable of bridging forms of social difference, describing the medium’s “ability to cross socio-cultural boundaries that often separate people and bring them together, as well as facilitating their ability to communicate with one another.”⁵³ Reflecting these priorities, the USC school offers training in diverse dance forms and has hired some estimable artists of color. Kaufman’s patronage evinces the hope that dance practices can connect diverse communities, while evading the social circumstances of white flight and racially exclusionary housing policies contributing to these historical divisions. Dance is intended to alleviate the social effects of the structural violence that predicates Kaufman’s fortune. While her foundation extols the ability of dance to connect people across difference, Kaufman simultaneously was dissatisfied with UCLA because it did not center conservatory training in western concert forms. Kaufman’s insistence that dance be happy suggests her desire to leave the enduring realities of racism and class stratification out of the stage light.⁵⁴

Kaufman’s philanthropic giving at UCLA and USC bears a relationship to the logic of real estate development that underpins her fortune. She focuses the bulk of her resources on funding permanent structures.⁵⁵ She provides facilities, and to a lesser extent, support for the ephemeral dance forms and people passing through them.⁵⁶ While dance schools are often rooted in lineage—founded to continue the work of a particular choreographer, form, or cultural tradition—Kaufman prefers to start a dance school out of nowhere. She remodeled a facility for a BFA program at UCLA that does not exist and started a department at USC from scratch. The dance buildings she funds mirror the logic of a subdivision, leveling an area (or a department) to plop down a new development. Rather than foreground dance traditions specific to Los Angeles (home to the legacies of Bella Lewitsky, Lester Horton, and Lula Washington, for example), Kaufman imports prestige from elsewhere.

What is Kaufman up to here? Viewed in a Bourdieuan light, Kaufman’s philanthropic endeavors might function as a tool for self-aggrandizement and inflating her social position. Her activity resonates with the customary practice of the rich to use patronage to control their representation (figuring themselves as generous donors rather than as beneficiaries of exploitation). Descriptions of Kaufman’s generosity abound in the reportage about her, and in 2017, Dance Magazine named Kaufman one of the most influential people in dance.⁵⁷ Kaufman exemplifies the bourgeois dilettantism that characterizes arts patronage since the decline of aristocratic support. As art historian Jaap van der Tas describes, these wealthy, dilettante clients understand art as a process of building character: “the associated bourgeois ideal of Bildung refers to the process of character-building through the acquisition of culture.”⁵⁸ Kaufman becomes a patron of an identity, the dancer, and the mythology that the sweaty effort of technical training is a vehicle for personal development. We must think about the opportunities that Kaufman provides for dancers to develop their prowess in relation to what was taken to amass this fortune. While the programs at UCLA and USC provide dance education to a diverse and heterogeneous student body (including students of color and first generation college students), their scale is minute in comparison to the scope of Kaufman & Broad’s housing developments and their material effects on the landscape.⁵⁹ Ultimately, the question of Kaufman’s personal motivations for her philanthropy is peripheral to what strikes me as the more relevant question: how does philanthropy function materially in capital accumulation strategies and their reverberations at the level of urban development? One can certainly speculate about how patronage operates as a means to inflate an individual’s prestige and social standing. I am not concerned with Kaufman’s intentions or individual psychology, but with how such investment functions within Los Angeles and its wider economic context.

The Remaking of Downtown Los Angeles

Kaufman’s dance philanthropy is nestled within broader struggles to further urban development in Los Angeles. Journalistic accounts of Kaufman’s recent activity highlight how Los Angeles is emerging as a hub for premiere dance institutions. Bonnie Oda Homsey, the director of the Los Angeles Dance Foundation, described to the LA Times the potential of the dance program at USC: “This new school is going to put us [Los Angeles] on the map [. . .] Los Angeles is really poised to become a more forward-thinking dance mecca.”⁶⁰ USC Dean Cutietta echoed this expectancy: “Dance is just taking off here [. . .] A lot of that has to do with Glorya’s gift to the Music Center, and the timing is perfect now. This is the next piece of the puzzle.”⁶¹ Jodie Gates used a manifest destiny metaphor to describe the allure of dance in LA: “It’s covered wagon time again [. . .] There’s opportunity in the West. Dancers are moving here to dance, and choreographers are coming here to form companies.”⁶² In an interview with the New York Times, Kaufman described her ambition to change the representation of Los Angeles as devoid of important cultural institutions: “These dancers will be known all over the world. And L.A. will now have the reputation of being a little more cultural. [. . . .] You know New York and San Francisco have been putting us down forever.”⁶³ In addition to funding touring dance companies at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, Kaufman has participated in the creation of major art institutions as a founding member of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and a patron of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). These cultural initiatives are a part of two undertakings: to elevate the status of Los Angeles and to restructure development within the city. Understanding the wider context for Kaufman’s philanthropy requires delving into the history of urban struggles in the region.

Urban scholars have characterized the history of Los Angeles as an oscillation between decentralization and re-centralization over the course of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1925, land speculation was a chief engine of capital accumulation in Southern California.⁶⁴ The wealth derived from widespread suburban development (including the subdivision of Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley) provided the financial means to build out downtown as concentrated center of civic life.⁶⁵ In the 1920s, downtown Los Angeles functioned as a commercial hub, filled with office buildings, banks, grand hotels, restaurants, movie palaces, and streetcars.⁶⁶ Key members of the capitalist class, led by Harry Chandler of the LA Times fortune, invested their wealth in downtown real estate, contributing to centralization of commerce there.⁶⁷ Beginning with World War II, development began to seep west, as shopping centers and office buildings spurted up along Wilshire Boulevard. Wealth shifted into neighborhoods on the Westside, including Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood. In the postwar period, Los Angeles followed a pattern of residential and commercial decentralization, resulting in a decline in downtown’s share of the retail trade and its property values. Urban renewal planners and developers began to hatch projects intended to re-center the city through a revitalized downtown. City officials designated Bunker Hill, a densely populated, working class immigrant neighborhood within the downtown vicinity, as a slum, slotting it for urban renewal. By the mid-1960s, bulldozers leveled Bunker Hill’s apartment buildings and Victorian houses, as the neighborhood underwent a large scale redevelopment process. Modeled on New York City’s Lincoln Center, which used elite cultural institutions to buttress urban renewal, wealthy patrons funded the construction of the Los Angeles Music Center, which opened in 1964 and displaced the working class immigrant cultures previously inhabiting the neighborhood.

In subsequent decades, Eli Broad took it as personal project to turn downtown Los Angeles into a cultural mecca, playing a key role in pushing through the establishment of additional cultural institutions in the former Bunker Hill. In 1979, Broad presided over the creation of the MOCA and in 1996, was the key fundraiser for the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, both on Grand Avenue. Designed to house the collection of contemporary art held by the Broad Art Foundation, the $140 million Broad Museum opened in the fall of 2015, across the street from the MOCA. Mirroring Glorya Kaufman’s intent, Broad explicitly frames this cultural offensive as a contribution to building the international profile of Los Angeles: “The museum [MOCA] would be essential if Los Angeles hoped to become an internationally respected center of the arts and benefit from all the tourism, arts education, and other opportunities that would come with that status.”⁶⁸ Underpinning these projects is the desire for these institutions to give the shapeless city some coherence and cultural anchors, elevating the prestige and property values in Los Angeles. Urban historian Sharon Zukin details this strategy:

There are, moreover, special connections between artists and corporate patrons. In such cities as New York and Los Angeles, the presence of artists documents a claim to these cities’ status in the global hierarchy. The display of art, for public improvement or private gain, represents an abstraction of economic and social power. Among business elites, those from finance, insurance, and real estate are generally great patrons of both art museums and public art, as if to emphasize their prominence in the city’s symbolic economy.⁶⁹

Fueled by these large scale projects, gentrification of downtown Los Angeles continues to displace lower income residents and bring in new waves of real estate speculation.⁷⁰ Mike Davis urges us to see cultural investment in the redevelopment of downtown LA as deliberate strategy within the framework of broader socio-spatial polarization within the city: “The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to raze all association with Downtown’s past and to prevent any articulation with the non-Anglo urbanity of its future.”⁷¹ While these centers for contemporary art might appear as a contribution to cultural life in Los Angeles, we must attend to the race and class antagonisms that undergird the conceptions of the “public good” for the city.⁷² Capitalists and real estate speculators have long used cultural institutions to further their goals. Mike Davis describes the “real-estate/arts nexus” in the context of Los Angeles: “a wealthy institutional matrix has coalesced—integrating elite university faculties, museums, the arts press and foundations—single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants.”⁷³ Los Angeles has blurred the urban/suburban distinction, as the city itself followed a pattern of low-density development, prioritizing the single family residence as the primary housing unit. The far-flung quality of Los Angeles, its lack of a coherent center, has been a liability, and downtown redevelopment aimed to re-center the fragmented metropolis. Real estate firms, such as Kaufman & Broad, fuel investment in downtown cultural institutions, as building these art centers has become a critical component of keeping Los Angeles competitive with other metropolitan areas. Sociologist Miriam Greenberg uses the term “urban branding” to characterize how urban elites fund cultural institutions and market the distinctiveness of a city to protect their material interests, encourage tourism, and raise property values.⁷⁴

UCLA and USC have differentiated roles within Los Angeles. UCLA is a public university on the west side and surrounded by some of LA’s most affluent neighborhoods including Westwood, Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. Located in a more diverse and working class part of the city, USC is a private institution whose expansion is connected to broader attempts to redevelop sections of downtown Los Angeles. While serving distinct functions within the social and economic landscape of Los Angeles, they participate alongside other cultural institutions in buttressing the city’s property values and development prospects.

The circumstances of both Broad and Kaufman’s philanthropy—that wealth generated through the mass production of suburban tract housing later becomes funding for contemporary art and dance institutions in an urban center—complicates the urban/suburban relationship. Kaufman & Broad made it their business to disseminate suburban housing on a large scale, encouraging the de-centralization of regional development. In the postwar period, suburbia offered peaceful, residential homes for white families, distanced from their racialized fears about urban life. Yet with this movement to the suburbs came banality, inauthenticity, and boredom. Suburbia—its site un-specificity, its “anywhere” quality, its sterile safety, its endless replication—generated the lure of the urban. The impulse to live in the city, to be proximate to art scenes and “ethnic” restaurants, in turn fuels gentrification, which David Harvey describes: “Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas, now gets its antidote in a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and a boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfill urban dreams.”⁷⁵ In the case of Kaufman & Broad, the spoils of suburban development become concentrated in an urban center and used to re-make the city in the image of elite, white interests that ultimately displace working class, immigrant communities.⁷⁶ By focusing on internationally recognized high art, the institutions spearheaded by Broad and Kaufman tend to de-prioritize cultural production specific to local communities, especially work by and for black, Latinx, and Asian American artists in Los Angeles.⁷⁷

Kaufman’s dance patronage returns to the world some of the vitality stolen by unleashing landscapes of housing subdivisions. Perhaps an unconscious form of contrition, Kaufman’s support for concert dance functions as an antidote to suburban banality: the unglamorous, relentlessly quantitative character of tract housing becomes transubstantiated into dance patronage. Philanthropy could provide Kaufman and Broad with a means to deflect criticism. In his piece on the opening of Eli Broad’s art museum, Peter Schjeldahl asks, “Why would anyone gainsay immense wealth when looking at the delightful things that may be done with it?”⁷⁸ In addition to the ideological moves, Glorya Kaufman also has her own real estate investments to look after. Kaufman currently lives in Beverly Hills at 1140 Laurel Way, which she bought in May 2012 for $18.2 million.⁷⁹ She previously resided at a 48-acre compound in Brentwood’s Mandeville Canyon (at 3100 Mandeville Canyon Road), which was listed on the market as a $40 million dollar estate but sold in May 2014 for $16 million to hedge-fund manager David Ganek.⁸⁰ Likely disappointed by this loss, Kaufman has a financial stake in protecting Los Angeles’ property values.

Conclusion

Charting the relationship between Kaufman & Broad’s business, Glorya Kaufman’s dance philanthropy, and struggles over the development of Los Angeles allows us to see a broader picture surrounding recent funding for dance in Los Angeles. In the circumstances of Kaufman’s philanthropy, the racialized history of suburbanization becomes the means to assert a racialized aesthetics. The case of Kaufman’s patronage has implications for thinking about the art-real estate nexus, the politics of dance patronage, and the character of Los Angeles as a place.

Forging the connection between Kaufman & Broad’s subdivisions and contemporary dance in Los Angeles illuminates how patronage is bound up in real estate development, first as the means to generate the wealth that becomes patronage and second as cultural initiatives buttress property values. Sharon Zukin’s scholarship demonstrates that art has a direct utility for real estate speculation, as museums, theaters, and schools become vehicles for the valorization of urban land holdings.⁸¹ Zukin’s materialist geography invites us to see how cultural institutions and the built environment register the movement of capital. From this perspective, concert dance is not oppositional to capital accumulation or real estate development but a component of these processes. While some scholars assert that performance resists the commodification of the art object, we must also take note of how venues for ephemeral art forms play a role in real estate speculation.

The case of Kaufman’s dance patronage provides a critical vantage point to examine the politics of cultural funding and how the material circumstances of capital accumulation, after the fact, become framed as generosity. On one hand, it is obvious that fortunes held by white beneficiaries of exploitation and racialized dispossession fund many cultural institutions. This was as true of California’s robber barons of 19th century as it is today. Walter Benjamin encapsulated this social fact in the oft-quoted maxim “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁸² In a certain sense, my tracking of how Glorya Kaufman came to possess her wealth might seem too apparent and lacking in subtlety, like noting the mild weather in California. On the other hand, dance scholars rarely incorporate these economic processes into analyses of concert dance. I dwell in the banal yet rarely dealt with the material conditions of dance in the hope that the familiar may begin to seem strange and, perhaps even, intolerable. I hope that generous support comes to seem eerie and ominous. In some respects, the details of where Kaufman’s money comes from do not matter, because capital accumulation flows from the same source: exploitation. The specifics of Kaufman’s case are relevant, however, to re-contextualizing celebrations of an alleged dance renaissance in Los Angeles. While the rich seek to transubstantiate their wealth into enduring civic institutions and cultural immortality, we must attend to what was involved in accumulating these fortunes and how concert dance might materialize as the fruit or flowers placed atop a capitalist system.⁸³

So long as we continue to live within a capitalist mode of production, dance, like all things, will remain bound up in the structures of exploitation that underpin our world. In response to surveying the influence of economic factors upon dance, some might seek to defend the autonomy of the medium, advocating for a good, sustainable, and just institutionality. Some might rally for an increase in public funding for the arts to curtail the influence of wealthy individuals. Some might call for a democratization of leadership at cultural institutions or a more inclusive curatorial framework. What distinguishes a Marxian perspective from these more social democratic modes is a foundational critique of capitalist accumulation.⁸⁴ Dance as an art medium is ripe with contradiction; concert dance both is and is not autonomous from capital. Rather than defending the autonomy of dance from economic incursion, I focus on the ambivalences that necessarily accompany concert dance within a capitalist context. The contradictions within the field of dance (that dancers’ movements are both free and constrained) will find resolution only through a historical change in the organization of economic life more broadly.⁸⁵

Investigating where Glorya Kaufman’s money comes from parallels gestures of institutional critique that have emerged within the visual arts.⁸⁶ Artists and critics have queried what the act of unveiling the economic underpinnings of art institutions does for the field and for those issuing the critique. Critic Isabelle Graw contends that art institutions have incorporated and neutralized forms of critical practice.⁸⁷ Graw’s perspective illuminates how critiques can re-sanctify the institution and serve as a mode of gaining notoriety within art fields. In an interview, the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren gives an account of drafting a letter of protest against the sponsorship of an exhibit by the tobacco company Philip Morris:

But you know, was it all a storm in a tea cup. Artists refused to sign, they said it was all insane or meaningless, too specific, too passive, if we attack Philip Morris, why not this or that company or trustee. And we are all a part of this world, aren’t we? And so on and so on, as we all know it too well! The situation just got worse and worse, compromised by a general acceptance of the status quo. Discouraging!⁸⁸

Buren’s narrative points to the difficulty of defining the boundaries of critique, which can result in political resignation. In writing about critical art practices, Andrea Fraser defines institutional critique as “a methodology of critical reflexive site-specificity,” which invites the artist to reflect on how the object of critique is also within oneself.⁸⁹ She notes how the art field is not simply composed of established museums, but involves many participants who make up the social relations surrounding art.⁹⁰ For Fraser, institutional critique can involve a splitting off of unwanted aspects of ourselves onto an external object—the museum, the corporate sponsor, or the patron, for example. Reflecting on how one participates in institutions is at the core of critical art practice. Fraser advocates for a recognition by artists of their role in the legitimation of capital accumulation that funds art institutions:

If our only choice is to participate in this economy or abandon the art field entirely, at least we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or—adding insult to injury—social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality—the (not so) new legitimation function of art museums.⁹¹

Fraser responds here to those that frame institutional critique as impotent, self-serving, or leading to a resigned complacency. Fraser encourages artists to not shroud their work in the language of social justice and avoid confronting the economic relations at play within contemporary art.⁹² Reflective of her own ambivalent position, Fraser currently is the chair of UCLA’s art department housed within the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center. Practices of institutional critique often open further swirls of ambiguity, as critical artists ascend in the art world and sell their work to wealthy collectors for large sums of money. While strategies in the visual arts are by no means a model to be glorified, they invite us to critically examine our institutional location and sit with the contradictions of our economic context. The field of dance has yet to have a significant wave of institutional critique. Perhaps this methodology can offer a way of engaging more fully with concert dance’s (often contradictory) work in the world.

As Kaufman & Broad has been headquartered in Los Angeles since 1963 and Glorya Kaufman has devoted her philanthropy to the city, I want to turn to Los Angeles as both the site of this study and a character within it. What kind of place do we think Los Angeles is? What illusions do we have about California? California holds something particular for the larger American imaginary: it functions as a projection screen for collective hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The mythology of California as a place of golden sunshine, easily found riches, and outdoor splendor keeps us wedded to the settler project: that we, too, can get ours. The westward movement of American settlement was deeply motivated by land speculation and the hope that anything can grow within Californian soil. Mike Davis describes how central real estate development has been to California’s history: “Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation, in fact, of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the West from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific.”⁹³ In addition to illuminating how important the creation of a city mythology was to land speculation, Davis offers a central dialectic to understand the city: sunshine and noir.⁹⁴ For Davis, the dialectical tension between sun-kissed, shining affluence and the repressed reality of swindle, class struggle, and racism offers an epistemological frame to grasp Los Angeles. In her take on the city, Joan Didion encapsulates Los Angeles as “a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city currently afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber.”⁹⁵ The city, in its “double role of utopia and dystopia,” functions as a metonym for capitalism as a whole.⁹⁶ Within this frame, endless subdivisions of tract housing and Glorya Kaufman’s dilettantish philanthropy fit right into city, allowing us to see more clearly the character of Los Angeles as “a bright, guilty place.”⁹⁷

I completed my doctorate in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department at UCLA in the fall of 2017. This essay is, in part, a way of digesting my time in Kaufman Hall, the seven years I spent walking past the bust of Glorya Kaufman. The department paid me approximately $10,000 per year to work as a teaching assistant. Not able to afford rent on the west side of Los Angeles, I lived in gentrifying neighborhoods on the east side, taking a long bus ride along Sunset Boulevard to campus each day. I began to research Glorya Kaufman as a way of answering many questions that nagged me as a graduate student. Why are graduate student workers paid so little but surrounded by white marble? Why is Los Angeles so spread out? Why do I feel alienated in this building and in Westwood more broadly? I noticed the headquarters of KB Home on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood not far from campus and began to wonder about the connections. Writing this essay has been a process of sitting with my own fantasies about what going to grad school, studying dance, and moving to Los Angeles would entail. I direct this essay not at Kaufman in particular, but at the ways we daily maintain this unjustifiable world.

I thank Eunsong Kim, JJ Mull, and my two anonymous readers for their thoughtful feedback.