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Posts Tagged ‘Jeffrey Deitch’

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May 1, 2013, 7:25 pm

Marge Simpson Nixes Gehry at MOCA

MOCA’s “A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California” is in jeopardy, reports Christopher Hawthorne in the L.A. Times. The much-anticipated survey of digital-LA’s swoopy architecture is/was to open June 2 as a linchpin of the Getty’s “PST Presents: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles.”

Explains Hawthorne, Frank Gehry “withdrew from the exhibition last month, despite what he described as entreaties from [guest curator Christopher] Mount, MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch and top officials from the Getty. ‘I didn’t feel comfortable in it,’ Gehry said. ‘It didn’t seem to be a scholarly, well-organized show… I’m subject to misunderstanding about the seriousness of my work. People assume I am just crumpling paper, and so forth. This was feeling a bit that way, a trivialization.”

“Crumpling paper” merits a sidebar. In 2011, CNN’s Fahreed Zakaria asked Gehry about “the famous story that you took a piece of paper and crumpled it and looked at it, and that was the Disney Hall in L.A.”

“But that’s a famous story because The Simpsons had me do that,” Gehry replied. “It has haunted me. People who’ve seen The Simpsons believe it.”

Rewind to 2005. Gehry was the first starchitect to do an animated guest shot on The Simpsons. Blue-haired homemaker Marge Simpson writes Gehry a letter, asking him to design a concert hall for Springfield. Gehry crumples up the letter. When he sees the tossed letter’s shape, he recognizes a work of genius.

The Simpsons gag has grown into an urban legend believed by otherwise well-informed journalists and clients. Gehry complained to CNN, “Clients come to me and say, ‘Crumple a piece of paper, we’ll give you $100 and then we’ll build it.’”

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March 14, 2013, 8:28 am

Deitch Love in the NYT

So far Jeffrey Deitch has been all but absent from press on the potentially newsworthy developments at MOCA. He cuts a higher profile in yesterday’s New York Times piece on the Hole, the downtown Manhattan gallery run by Deitch protégé Kathy Grayson.

“‘Jeffrey was the Wizard of Oz,’ [street artist Steve] Powers said. ‘He made great things happen. It was a meritocracy based on the best ideas winning.’

“So it came as a blow when Mr. Deitch closed the gallery to take the reins at MoCA. ‘Everybody in the community was very unhappy, and they were freaked out,’ Grayson said.”

The article explains that Grayson’s gallery is called the Hole “to reflect the void left by Deitch’s closing.”

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March 13, 2013, 9:41 am

National Gallery Hooks a Big One

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.

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March 10, 2013, 8:42 am

Deitch Tries a Pledge Drive; Eli Speaks

So far the two pivotal players at MOCA—Jeffrey Deitch and Eli Broad—have been silent over the reports of a LACMA takeover offer. As entirely circumstantial evidence of what they’re thinking, I submit the following.

The MOCA home page has a button requesting cash donations for the museum as an “independent” center for contemporary art. This would be a grassroots campaign, as the menu of gift amounts ranges from $10 to $1500. (I’ll leave you to do the math.) I take this to mean that not everyone at MOCA is committed to a takeover.

It looks like Eli Broad’s 2008 bailout may give him make-or-break power over any MOCA-LACMA deal. Broad hasn’t been saying much to the press, but his web minions know he’s a regular chatterbox on Twitter. Broad’s account @UnreasonableEli was started to promote his book, and OK, I know he doesn’t type every tweet. But if you look at the snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom posted over the past few days and use a little imagination… it might be he’s trying to tell us something.

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March 7, 2013, 6:54 pm

LACMA/MOCA: Who Wins, Who Loses?

LACMA has (again) proposed a takeover of MOCA (LA Times story; Michael Govan post). Preliminary reports say the deal would preserve the MOCA name (“brand”) and both downtown buildings. It’s contingent on LACMA raising $100 million—exactly for what isn’t clear. Supposing the takeover happens, who wins and who loses? (Above, Chris Burden’s Hell Gate, jointly owned by LACMA and MOCA.)

WINNER: Govan’s vision of LACMA, the most contemporary big museum in America. This agreeable concept suffered a setback when Eli Broad elected not to donate his collection but to build his own museum. A merger would give LACMA access to MOCA’s collection rather than Broad’s, and in some ways that’s better yet. MOCA’s Rothkos and Pollocks and Rauschenbergs could allow a seamless presentation of contemporary American art, postwar to right now.

LOSER: MOCA as an independent entity. Organization charts have consequences. However much the LACMA folks may swear that everything will be the same at MOCA, it won’t be. PS1 isn’t the same after MoMA took over. I’m not saying it’s worse, just that it reflects the MoMA worldview. (For what it’s worth, PS1 is probably the best-case scenario for a future MOCA as LACMA outpost.)

Fantastic as MOCA’s collection is, its history of ground-breaking exhibitions is even more impressive. MOCA did a lot to start the global “Museum of Contemporary Art” meme. Should the merger happen, Los Angeles would be virtually the only big American city lacking a dedicated museum of contemporary art, in those words or close to them and unencumbered by a a founder’s surname. San Diego, Scottsdale, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Cleveland Detroit, and Atlanta have got their own MOCA’s. Hot Springs, Arkansas has a MOCA.

LOSER: Eli Broad, going by the stories that he’s been pushing for a U.S.C. takeover of MOCA. That’s not counting the “Broad conspiracy” legend that the billionaire philanthropist covets MOCA’s art for his own museum. Foiled!—if Govan gets it first.

What’s reasonably certain is that Broad hopes for a healthy, self-sustaining MOCA across the street from his new museum. The LACMA takeover is being pitched as a way to solve MOCA’s chronic financial problems. That would be good for Broad and everyone else (though a LACMA merger isn’t the only conceivable solution).

Incidentally, Broad’s 2008 MOCA bailout included a poison-pill saying that the museum couldn’t be acquired (through 2018) by a nearby institution unless it was university-affiliated. It’s hard to say whether the LACMA proposal could squeeze free of that.

BIGGEST LOSER: MOCA Pacific Design Center. It’s not been mentioned in the initial reports. The main rationale for MOCA’s third building was to give it an outpost on the near Westside. There would be less need for it after a LACMA takeover.

POSSIBLE LOSER: MOCA Grand Avenue. LACMA’s first overture, in 2008, emphasized the Geffen building. “Additional programs are planned for MOCA’s Grand Avenue site.” That sounded an awful lot like the Autry’s plans for the Southwest Museum. The new LACMA promises to support Arata Isozaki’s building, but a skeptic might wonder what its long, long-term prospects would be. I would think it’s easier for a cowboy museum to justify a Native American branch than it is to justify three large buildings for  contemporary art in the same city. In a future downturn, some bean-counter is sure to ask, why do we need Grand Avenue? (The Geffen building in Little Tokyo was MOCA’s first site and remains its best-loved and most influential.)

OPEN QUESTION: Jeffrey Deitch. (Also not mentioned in the initial reports.) And mainly, L.A.’s high net-worth museum supporters other than Eli Broad. MOCA came to this pass because it couldn’t raise operating funds or build an endowment. If the LACMA proposal has merit, it will have to be because it will be easier to raise funds for the combined institution.

UPDATE: In a new statement MOCA Mobilization, which staunchly opposed the 2008 merger, says that “The Board of Trustees has failed” and “MOCA is a diminished institution.” Pointedly it does not express an opinion about the new proposal.

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February 11, 2013, 9:02 am

Recent Acquisitions at MOCA

MOCA Grand Avenue is doing three simultaneous shows of recent acquisitions. One is the first full display of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel’s 2005 gift of minimalist and conceptualist works on paper. Another samples from Laurence A. Rickels’ 2011 donation of 122 pieces by L.A. artists of the 1990s. Together they demonstrate that you don’t have to be a billionaire to collect museum-worthy art.

Though it helps. The marquee exhibition, “MOCA’s Permanent Collection: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions” debuts star objects added in the past two years. Most are due to very wealthy supporters of the museum. Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin Chess (2003), the trippy highlight of last fall’s show of artists’ chess sets in London, is a gift of the Getty Trust. The Getty generally doesn’t donate art to other museums, and their foray into chess ended with Barry Munitz. Right?

At MOCA the same room has mural-scaled tableaux by Cai Guo-Qiang (Desire for Zero Gravity) and Elliott Hundley (The Lightning’s Bride) and an Aaron Curry sculpture, Pierced Line (Brown Goblinoid). Don’t go by the above photo, or by the supposition that Curry is a retro cocktail of Calder/Noguchi/Smith with a twist of street-art relevance. You need to walk around Pierced Line to appreciate how freaky-strange it is. Curry won LACMA’s Art Here and Now purchase award in 2009, and it appears that LACMA came close to buying Pierced Line.

The display of trophies must be intended to reassure any who fear the recent bad press has doomed MOCA’s collecting mission. It’s less clear how many objects were added post-Schimmelgate, or whether it would have practical to schedule them for this show.

The most important work historically is a sort of tribute to Paul Schimmel, Mike Kelley’s The Little Girl’s Room, a gift of the artist. (It wasn’t on view at the Sunday opening.) The Little Girl’s Room was Kelley’s first installation conceived as a stage set for a performance, and thus a nexus in the commingling of sculpture and performance.

A few acquisitions might be said to exemplify the glam-rock stereotype of Deitch taste. Others play against type. There’s a painting by the profoundly trend-averse Tom Wudl, an artist that, you might think, MOCA never knew existed. (At right, Wudl’s The Sublime Interpenetration of Ignorance & Perfection.)

For a glitzier take on ignorance and perfection, high art and Hollywood, see Francesco Vezzoli’s Crying Portrait of Tatjana Patitz as a Renaissance Madonna with Holy Child (After Raffaello). It’s one of a group of portraits of actors-models-whatevers in Cinquecento drag. German-born and Malibu-resident Patitz, the pre-Heidi Klum consort of Seal, weeps streams of embroidered tears.

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February 5, 2013, 2:39 pm

Frenemies of the Museum

MOCA watchers will want to read Bob Coalcello’s venom-packed and unreliable narrator-dense article in the March Vanity Fair.

• MOCA Lifetime Trustee Lenore Greenberg on Eli Broad’s conditions for bailing out MOCA: “There were all those strings attached, which I call ropes with nooses on the end.”

• Dealer Irving Blum: “I think a big mistake that Jeffrey [Deitch] made was not getting rid of [Paul] Schimmel right at the start.”

• Deitch on the Dennis Hopper show: “There were a number of people here who said, ‘You can’t do this. This is not right for moca.’ So I went to Ed Ruscha and said, ‘If you think that I shouldn’t do this show, I’m not going to do it.’ He said, ‘Do the show. It’s really important.’ ”

• Deitch on “The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol”: “Of the 350 shows I have organized in my career, it was one of the most perfectly realized.”

• Greenberg on that “Broad Conspiracy” rumor: “…Eli has had to declare himself. He had to say that he didn’t want to take over moca’s collection, which I think he originally wanted to do.”

• Coalcello’s take on the MOCA-USC merger rumor, as of January: “I learned that the negotiations with U.S.C. were going forward, driven by a determined Eli Broad, but that the moca board was divided. In a surprising twist, many members wanted to reconsider a merger or partnership with lacma.”

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January 20, 2013, 12:09 pm

MOCA the Likeable

Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that donations of art to MOCA have not, as doomsayers feared, fallen off a cliff. Here’s another positive indicator: MOCA is the city’s most liked museum.

That’s “liked” as in Facebook likes. MOCA has 194,316 likes, putting it far ahead of the Getty (134,553) and LACMA (110,666). Does this mean anything? A few years ago I would have shrugged. Now Facebook is so mainstream that it’s hard to ignore. (At top, from MOCA’s collection: James Rosenquist’s A Lot to Like).

RETNA: 22,764 likes

You might suppose that contemporary art draws younger crowds who are more active social net users. That’s true, but it can’t be the whole story. The Hammer has only only 19,099 likes.

There is similar pattern in New York, where the numbers are larger. MoMA has 1.26 million likes, versus 783,000 for the Metropolitan Museum. But MoMA has Matisse, Picasso, and van Gogh. MOCA stakes everything on post-WWII art and often on emerging artists or “forgotten” history. That makes its lead among L.A. museums all the more surprising.

None of this changes the fact that MOCA’s attendance is a fraction of LACMA’s or the Getty’s. Ergo, MOCA visitors (and hangers-on) are many times more inclined to click the like button. I’m not sure what that means except that it suggests a special connection to the city’s contemporary museum.

Spider Pavilion: 9 Likes

There’s no way of knowing how many likes are endorsements of Jeffrey Deitch populism or Paul Schimmel counterintuitivity—or whether this dubious dichotomy exists in the mind of the average liker. I suspect that MOCA picked up a lot of likes during “Art in the Streets.” Many artists in that show have racked up impressive numbers of likes on their own Facebook pages. Shepard Fairey has 51,344 likes, and RETNA has 22,764. In comparison it’s rare for a non-street artist to have 1000 likes (and not all care to have a like button on their FB page). John Baldessari has 2633.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has 26,422 likes, and its Spider Pavilion has 9 likes.

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October 20, 2012, 5:33 pm

Which Woody Allen Character is Most Like Jeffrey Deitch?

Guy Trebay’s New York Times profile of Jeffrey Deitch likens the MOCA director to a character in a Woody Allen film. Make your guess before clicking the link. Hint: It’s not Jimmy Bond in the 1967 Casino Royale.

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September 25, 2012, 10:49 am

Disco? Tattoos!

The director of a financially troubled downtown museum is promising to bring in a younger, more diverse audience with a “game-changer” show on tattoos. “I think this has the potential for being the biggest show we’ve ever done here.”

No, that’s not who you think it is talking, it’s Greg Kimura, director of the Japanese American National Museum since April. Richard Guzman, in the Los Angeles Downtown News, has a profile. (At left: the work of Little Tokyo’s Mr. Cartoon.)

Kimura’s rhetoric sounds a bit like Jeffrey Deitch’s. He leads a respected museum with cash-flow issues, and he figures that the programming that made the museum respected isn’t popular enough. Kimura intends to draw coveted demographics in the belief that money will follow (somehow). A show on the L.A. Dodgers in the works. The connection to JANM’s mission is, well, that some of the Dodgers are Japanese-American. Ironically, Kimura is also talking about having more shows of cutting-edge contemporary art. Maybe he and Deitch need to confer what does and doesn’t spike the box office.

For what it’s worth, I’d bet that more 25-year-olds are interested in tattoos than disco.

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