When you type “Chris Burden” into Google Images there are no pictures of him smiling. When you type “Chris Burden smiling,” nothing much changes. I mean, there are a few shots. The mechanical gesture doesn’t ever, as far as I can tell, reach past half-face to the eyes. Of course, nobody except a writer doing weird things with Google cares if a man doesn’t smile. It is, as they say, a non-starter.

In 1967, Maurice Tuchman, a young LACMA curator, initiated the Art and Technology program: a "hair-raising idea" to pair artists, scientists, and corporations that aimed to envision the future. It was a project so ambitious and optimistic it had to fail.

Artist Billy Al Bengston and architect Frank Gehry have been friends for more than 50 years. In 1968, when Bengston was given a museum survey at LACMA, they collaborated on the installation: Reconfiguring the galleries with plywood walls, borrowed furniture, Black Power posters, they knocked exhibition design out of the white cube.