Critic's Notebook: MOCA's complicated choice of a new director

Why does the Museum of Contemporary Art’s board of trustees dislike art museums?

That’s the uncomfortable question hanging in the air as the nation’s premier contemporary art museum names Jeffrey Deitch, 57, its fourth director in 30 years. In selecting new leadership, trustees shunned candidates from an international museum roster that has grown vast in recent decades.

 Instead they reached deep into the New York art market to find a director for the critically admired, financially strapped institution. Except for a brief, youthful stint in the 1970s, Deitch has no professional experience in the American museum world, either as a curator or director.

Deitch has been an art dealer and advisor to private collectors, corporations and art investors for three decades. His selection is inevitably framed as daring and audacious, but the appointment of a businessman to run a nonprofit in fact feels reactionary — a profoundly conservative response to the fiscal mismanagement of the museum’s prior administration, which nearly toppled MOCA in 2008.

Nor is going outside the museum profession adventuresome. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art tried it in 1995, to scant effect, with the appointment of UCLA executive vice chancellor Andrea L. Rich to its top post. The knock then was that Rich had no art credentials, a void Deitch’s appointment skirts.

Deitch is smart, thoughtful about art and extremely successful. His well-informed taste is oriented toward a Pop aesthetic — his gallery’s logo adapts a Warhol Brillo box — for which I have considerable sympathy. And although it has been nearly 20 years since he organized the much-admired exhibition “Post Human,” it was indeed a group show with resonance.

But there have been fiascoes too.

In 2006 his gallery was the centerpiece of a television reality show called “Artstar,” a little-watched Dish Network show co-produced with the MTV programmer who brought us “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Eight relative unknowns vied for a Deitch Projects exhibition — “Project Runway” for hungry SoHo and Chelsea wannabes. Copy-cat programming is how commercial TV operates, but it is not inventive.

Like the separation of church and state, the educational motives of an art museum differ from the entrepreneurial ones at a for-profit business. Legal restrictions also apply, since official actions at a nonprofit cannot benefit one personally, the way they are meant to do in a business. Deitch’s unusual appointment drives a bulldozer through that wall, and he will need to tiptoe through the rubble.

Notably, beyond his own gallery almost all of Deitch’s curatorial résumé (including “Post Human”) is for projects in Europe and Japan, where an independent nonprofit sector is weak or virtually nonexistent. The appointment represents an unexpected institutional blow-back from globalization — MOCA as cultural maquiladora.

The late Walter Hopps did co-own L.A.’s Ferus Gallery from 1957 to 1962, prior to his museum career, but no one would ever mistake the mercurial Hopps for a sharp businessman. Deitch becomes the only gallery owner to assume the director’s post at a major American art museum. MOCA has thus created a vexing problem: Virtually every planning move its new director makes will raise questions about its relationship to Deitch’s veiled commercial entanglements, which are long-standing and international in scope.

For instance, one question already swirls: Is MOCA partly making a play for the blue-chip collection of Dakis Joannou, 69, the Greek construction magnate, hotelier and Coca-Cola franchiser?

Joannou, a trustee of New York’s New Museum, where he is currently embroiled in a controversy over that institution’s decision to show a small portion of his 1,500-work collection in March, has said he has no intention to build a private museum. Deitch sparked Joannou’s original interest in contemporary art a quarter-century ago and has been his close advisor ever since.

Deitch is a Harvard Business School MBA with an undergraduate degree in art history from Wesleyan University. He launched his New York career in 1979 as a co-founder of Citibank’s art investment service, just as MOCA went on the drawing board. After nine years he struck out on his own as a private dealer. In addition to Joannou, he sold paintings and sculptures to corporations, assorted entrepreneurial Japanese businessmen and such private clients as MOCA board member Eli Broad and Geffen Contemporary namesake David Geffen.

Which raises more speculation: Perhaps the appointment is partly an effort to reel Geffen back into the MOCA fold, after several decades’ absence. But then, since MOCA is currently understaffed, having lost its most senior curator and deputy director in recent months, will talented museum professionals want to risk careers by going to work for a museum that mixes business with pleasure?

Presumably MOCA’s new director will be required to divest himself of all commercial or competing nonprofit arrangements, including two galleries in Lower Manhattan and one in Long Island City, across the East River from the United Nations. (Deitch Projects’ roster of 33 artists includes one from Los Angeles — Jim Isermann.) Since Deitch is reportedly a significant contemporary art collector in his own right, he should also be required to liquidate, or at the very least articulate the precise contents of his art holdings.

There is nothing wrong with a lively and robust art market, but Deitch’s commercial commitments are problematic for his new job. The problem is that the market represents a very narrow slice of a vast art-pie. Art commerce gets out-sized press because the public, although generally unfamiliar with and incurious about art, is familiar with and curious about money. In modern capitalism, art and popular culture intersect in the market.

Museums, on the other hand, are places where popular appeal should be irrelevant. Unpopular but potentially revolutionary art ideas need places to be seen, heard and debated. Depth, not breadth, is what matters. That’s what makes the American system of art museums conceptually unique, even if it doesn’t always work out that way in practice.

MOCA earned its place as the nation’s premier contemporary museum because it has a permanent collection and an exhibition history of a kind no other American museum has managed to muster. That’s been good for Los Angeles. Whether a businessman in the director’s office — especially a businessman from New York, center of the art trade — will be able to sustain that distinctive profile will, at the very least, be an interesting spectacle to watch.

-- Christopher Knight

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Above: Deitch at MOCA on Monday. Photo credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Looks like a match made in Heaven. Or Hell, depends on the Context, to use a now extinct Contemporary term, as all of this will soon go the way of the dinosaur. Revolutionary? ALL contempt art is academic, the very opposite of overturning the status quo, as its patrons ARE those very temporary and trendy powers that be.

Sorry, none of this matters. But I am sure they will get plentyof cash now. Just hope they sell their good late Modern works to a real museum someday, this one is tanked. In with Hirsts pickled critters.

art collegia delenda est
Save the Watts Towers, tear down the Ivories
now THATS revolutionary.

[D. Mather]

Knight is whipping up a fury about a subject that will rightly spark discussion, but this question of the director's pedigree is not so different from the other problems that contemporary art museums face: how to grow a collection and an audience without simply caving to a blockbuster mentality. I think that it is fair to ask that Deitch's role and personal holdings be well defined (perhaps held in a trust during his directorship), but that is a long way from saying that the market and the museum are irreconcilable. I think Knight is being a bit too simplistic when he says,

"There is nothing wrong with a lively and robust art market ... The problem is that the market represents a very narrow slice of a vast art-pie ... In modern capitalism, art and popular culture intersect in the market."

Art museums buy (excuse me, 'acquire') artworks too, and they do not transport to an imaginary economic realm to do it (i.e. it is still capitalism). Perhaps the market can be more critical than you might think, in which case, according to your logic, museums would have to become further divested.

Another problem with Knight's moral compass may or may not comport with actuality: "Museums ... are places where popular appeal should be irrelevant." That 'should' is a clue that he is not so sure. Continuing, "Unpopular but potentially revolutionary art ideas need places to be seen, heard and debated." He presumes that 'potentially revolutionary' is both going to be unpopular and unmarketable. I am not so sure that a NY market would not be 'revolutionary' somewhere in the US, but that is only assuming that Deitch imports his program into MoCA, which is unlikely.

There is actually a much more complicated relationship between market and museum than Knight would lead his readers to believe. Museums are not pure and markets are not impure: they actually impact the other, but how this is to occur is the better question.

[Anthony]

Why does Mr. Knight hate business people? The problem with museums now is their extreme detachment from the public. Museum training and education is outmoded and out of touch. To wit: the leadership turmoil at the Getty. Do you really think the Getty is connected in any real way to the LA public...that they have figured it out? Huge amounts of money seem useless in that case. Do you think the sterile BECAM LACMA is on the right path? The Hammer often looks like any commercial gallery - chasing the trendy "it" factor - just with more space. Your knee-jerk reaction is just that. Give the guy a chance. I think MoCA made a bold, inspired choice.

[trojan949]

This hiring is so so so wrong!

[truant]

as a new yorker, i have to say that you guys and gals are lucky and im sad to see him go. while a small space, going to events at deitch projects over the last 10 years has always kept me on my toes and broadened my aesthetic horizons. yes, the appointment is complicated; yes, its messy. but all these folks are in bed with each other anyways - there can never be revolution when you are talking about $10s of millions. and any academic who wasn't already in bed with the money men-- and got appointed to this position -- would just have to jump in the sack anyhow. and while he is from the commercial side, don't forget, he's no barbara gladstone, half the stuff he puts out there is in no way salable.

enjoy!

[BT]

Kudos to Christopher Knight for pointing out a potentially reactionary aspect to this so-called "gamechanging" appointment. The thing I find most dispiriting about the choice of Deitch isn't the fact that he comes from the art business instead of academia--I'm willing to take a wait-and-see attitude as to how he does or does not embrace the idea of the museum having a separate function from a commercial gallery; sometimes pressing those issues can be an enjoyable and provocative part of the art conversation, as with Murakami's profit-making Louis Vuitton store in the middle of a MOCA exhibition. (Or not, as when the recent opening of the permanent collection was presented as little more than a backdrop for Lady Gaga and glamorous movie actors to preen for cameras.) Of more concern to me, something Christopher Knight touches on and I hope he will elaborate upon in the future, is that Deitch represents not just the world of business, but specifically the New York City-art-market, a sub-culture which should not be confused with the entire universe of art activity. If MOCA is to lead in addressing questions of how to define and present contemporary art from the point of view of Los Angeles in the present, filtering those questions through the mentality of a NYC gallery/auction house/corporate art adviser, no matter how talented and brilliant, seems like a throwback to the long discredited myth that provincial LA needs cultural validation from center-of-the-world New York. The fact that the directors of LACMA and the Hammer, fine as they are (Ann Philbin has proven herself a real blessing to LA) both also established their careers in the New York art world makes the MOCA choice that much less adventuresome. Can anyone think the way to a vital, world-leading MOCA is more Jeff Koons?

[Artist]

The thing that most do not get is that the concept of a museum is dead. They are full of work by dead people and dead movements. Art museums have nothing to do with Art but with Art history. They are rich persons play grounds. The more you give the better the wine and food at the top tier members openings. Those truely interested in the Art know that galleries are the true life blood of the Arts. So maybe bring in a director who comes from a gallery background can bring a new perspective to this museum which is ailing in both direction and exhibits.

[Charlotte in Santa Monica]

I guess this is the logical conclusion of two decades of increasing influence of entrepreneurs into museums. The fact that Deitch advised Citibank says it all - Citibank, the most corrupt of all the corrupt banks, which is in large measure responsible for the economic catastrophe of 2008. I am sad that scholarship, ideas, and art historical context were not seen as priorities for MOCA. What ARE the priorities? Money, money, and more money. With strings pulled by Eli Broad.

[Nicollette Ramirez]

"Museums, on the other hand, are places where popular appeal should be irrelevant."
Not true as most museums across America are followers, and sadly enough followers of the market, of which many of their trustees partake in. This leads to exhibitions at the museums coinciding with exhibitions at the galleries that represent the artist on view in the museum. Same applies for exhibitions at museums which coincide with pieces being sold at the auction houses at the same time.
"Unpopular but potentially revolutionary art ideas need places to be seen, heard and debated." This is almost inevitably after the fact at a museum, where the dialog is constructed. Let's not forget Warhol's rejection letter from MoMA dated October 18, 1956 from the Director Alfred H Barr Jr. Some years later they were buying Warhols for their collection for millions of dollars and the rest is art history

[William Wray]

I think the supposed clash of cultures that are the theoretical two sides of art world is laughable smoke and mirrors. Outrage in this case inflamed by Mr. Knight’s hierophant concerns amount to a disingenuous echo of our obstinate political system. The Academic world has long ago lost its way by denying the roots of foundation art and most galleries support the same attitude. Posturing like there are aesthetic differences between two worlds that have long intermingled underlines the power of invention to give one’s own options some fussy relevance. It’s all just jostling for political power of an incestuous world of fine line shaving that’s eating its own tail.

[starpower]

The writer suggested that the incoming museum director should liquidate his art collection.

This is absurd!

Should an incoming library president liquidate his collection of first-edition and rare books?

[d.bo]

deitch's appointment to la moca parallels that of broadway producer rocco landesman's appointment to the nea. commerce long ago took over the arts; now it's being officially acknowledged.

[Donald Frazell]

It's a circus, bring in the clowns. Oh dont bother, they're here.