Just about everything about the reports of a MOCA partnership with the National Gallery of Art raises a red flag. (Above, Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey, in the NGA collection)
• The obvious: The NGA partnership does nothing to address MOCA’s financial problems.
• Or does it? “The hope is that our name, our programming, our expertise gives them a sense of backbone and stability,” said NGA chairman John Wilmerding. “Eli Broad is confident about this, that their trustees can raise the money, rebuild the endowment and bring it back to a place of fullness.” I find it hard to believe that the NGA’s name is going to cast a magical spell on MOCA’s trustees and induce them to open their checkbooks. We’ve been there before twice. When Broad bailed out MOCA in 2008, with a matching pledge no less, everyone assumed that MOCA’s finances were golden. But the trustees couldn’t even scrape up the challenge grant. When Jeffrey Deitch arrived in 2010, that too was perceived as a game changer sure to put MOCA at the corner of Grand Ave. and Easy Street. It didn’t happen, and I don’t see how an NGA partnership is going to have a better outcome.
• Where does MOCA’s art go? It’s been speculated that Broad wants to put MOCA’s art in the Broad, and LACMA wants to put it in BCAM. For all I know, USC is visualizing how MOCA’s Rothkos would look in the Fisher Museum of Art. On the one hand, this might seem to be less of a concern with the NGA, as the contemplated five-year deal is not a merger. But the NGA is adding 12,260 square feet of new exhibition space to its East Building. It will need to fill them, and long-term loans from a West Coast partner would be a way to do that. “Wilmerding said he would not rule out a deeper partnership later on… or perhaps even making MOCA a West Coast affiliate of the National Gallery.” If LACMA, USC, or Broad gain access to MOCA’s art, it still stays in Los Angeles.
• Most mortifying statement (from the New York Times piece): the National Gallery may be offering MOCA advice on “curatorial decisions.” This is exactly what MOCA doesn’t need. Even if that disco show is as kooky as it sounds, I’d rather see it than an exhibition of Jim Dine drawings. NGA organized that in 2004.
The NGA’s contemporary offerings skew strongly to blue-chip New York artists and standard retrospectives, often organized elsewhere. I’m not aware that they’ve ever originated a thematic group show or a research-intensive historical survey—the sorts of things that MOCA is known for.
Tags: Eli Broad, Jeffrey Deitch, Jim Dine, LACMA, MOCA, National Gallery, USC, USC Fisher Museum of Art
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“But the NGA is adding 12,260 square feet of new exhibition space to its East Building. It will need to fill them, and long-term loans from a West Coast partner would be a way to do that.”
The NGA has more than enough art to “fill them.”
Indeed, NGA has lots of big, modern/contemporary art and is chronically short on space. It doesn’t have an extensive MOCA-style collection of artists who emerged after the 1960s. If the NGA is interested in going less blue-chip and more current, MOCA loans could make a big difference. They’ve got plenty plenty of Ellsworth Kelly, not a single Mike Kelley!
Shouldn’t the deal be the other way around? A arrangement where the NGA offers serious funding money in exchange for MOCA agreeing to provide curatorial input for the National Gallery’s contemporary program (and maybe agreeing to send a show or two to Washington) would actually provide MOCA the money they need while the National Gallery’s modern and contemporary program would be able to learn from some of the best curators and scholars of post-1960 art in the country and maybe get Washington to do non-silly shows for a change(think something like MOCA’s Earth Art show instead of Jim Dine, I guess, or at least deciding to do a Photography in the 80s show as the season headliner instead of Warhol). Whether the NGA or anyone else in DC for that matter has the appetite for shows like that is another question. Incidentally, I wonder where in the museum this idea originate.
The NGA has not been historically friendly to cutting edge contemporary art. I have no doubt the curators there have the capacity, but there is not the institutional support for doing the kind of work that MOCA has done, and there may not be an audience (though perhaps they underestimate their audiences).Plus they are deseparate for most space to show art, The Pei building is beautiful, but it is mostly an empty hall with little gallery space. It is so weird that to offer ‘curatorial support’ for a vision they don’t even support in their own institution. And MOCA doesn’t need curatorial advice–they had it, and they fired it. And why the NGA, a federal institution, would get mixed up with a problematic gallerist-director and a dictatorial funder is beyond me. They should stick to doing what they’re known for–big, popular, ‘blue chip’ shows and sneaking in incredibly smart, well researched exhibitions under the radar(Shock of the News come to mind, some very fine photography shows) and let LACMA and MOCA come to an agreement that makes the most sense.