This is the first published interview with incoming MOCA director and current Deitch Projects gallery-owner Jeffrey Deitch. It was conducted via phone with Deitch in Los Angeles earlier tonight. (MOCA communications director Lyn Winter was on the call with Deitch, but did not participate in the Q&A.) [Image.]
For the sake of reading-ease, I’ll post this in three parts. The posts are roughly thematic, but are absolutely chronological in terms of how our conversation took place.
In part two, Deitch and I discuss some of the
ethical questions created by his new position. In part three, Deitch and I discuss his plans for MOCA’s future. In this section, part one, Deitch and I discuss move from commercial dealer to non-profit
executive.
MAN: Let’s start with a simple one. As you leave the gallery for MOCA, what do you see as the differences between running a commercial gallery and an art museum?
Jeffrey Deitch: Of course there are major, major differences. One is private-sector, one is public-sector. The museum director is responsible to a very extensive community: All the museum staff, the trustees, the local artists, the local art audience, Los Angeles civic leaders, [people] running other institutions and just the large audience that is here. Everyone is a stakeholder in this. Everybody feels that they are a part of the museum.
It’s nothing like a sole proprietorship. Running an art gallery, you’re only responsible to yourself. It’s maybe not as different as one might think though. The art world also takes a kind of ‘ownership interest’ in any kind of public program, so people who visit exhibitions at my gallery feel free to make public comments and give their suggestions. So I’ve been working in the public arena for many years. Even in a commercial art gallery you are responsible to the artists, the works of art and responsible to uphold the integrity of the art work and the integrity of the field.
MAN: A decade or two ago we saw museums bring in a run of MBA directors, people such as Tom Krens. Was that experiment, during which museums eschewed non-profit and academic art historical expertise, a success?
JD: I think very much so. One of my inspirations is Jack Lane. [Lane directed SFMOMA and the most recently the Dallas Museum of Art.] I believe Jack has a business degree and he is someone who is comfortable both as a creative manager and as a financial manager. It really does depend on the person and the situation. But ultimately the best person to run an art institution, whether it’s a museum or an opera company, is someone who is comfortable both in the creative world and in the management world. You really need to apply both skills and apply them simultaneously.
MAN: A museum director is a spokesperson for art, a spokesperson for the importance of art and artists in our society and an administrator who helps to enable acquisitions and scholarship. A dealer engages with a much narrower slice of the public, effectively people with the means to buy art. Being the public face of today’s art to a diverse community such as Los Angeles, probably the most diverse city in America, is very different from selling art to rich mostly white men, isn’t it?
JD: That is not at all how I conceived my role at the gallery. First of all I’ve run a public gallery with three spaces and with lots of public projects. Ninety-nine percent of my constituency running my gallery is the art-public, same type of public as the public of MOCA.
And the sales to art collectors — who are not at all just rich, white men — that’s not the way it is anymore at all. We sell all over the world and a lot of our clients are women, maybe even half of our clients are women. That’s the part that corresponds to raising money from trustees and other people in the community. I don’t feel that I am going into a completely different world, but a lot of the same people, same principles.
It’s obviously quite different going from the private sector that is commercial-sector, to the public sector supported by contributions and some revenue streams that have nothing to do with the commerce of art. But I feel that what I’ve been doing at Deitch Projects is in a way running my own private institute of contemporary art. I’ve just been using the market system to support it rather than contributions to support it. I’ve run a program that has non-commercial historical exhibits, historical exhibits with little or nothing for sale. [I've also done] projects that engage a large, young community like Michel Gondry’s mini-film studio, which cost a fortune to produce but with no chance to get any commercial revenue.
MAN: I understand all that, but I think I was getting at something a little bit different: As a museum director, you will be the public face of contemporary art to an enormous audience, much of which won’t care about contemporary art or will be suspicious of it. How will you represent art to those communities, particularly people who may not think they are interested in art.
JD: That’s a very good question, because that gets to why I wanted to take this on with MOCA. I’ll be serving a much larger, diverse audience, even though in my gallery I try to do that. I try to build a large community that is diverse and I think we have. At my gallery we’ve reached a much more diverse audience than most mainstream galleries. But that is one of the exciting challenges of MOCA. I’m very idealistic. I do believe that art can enhance people’s lives.
I believe in art as an economic generator. In a city like Los Angeles that no longer has that many corporate headquarters, large companies, where it doesn’t have the manufacturing base it once had… but what it has is one of the largest populations of creative people in the world, some of whom are engaged with art, some of whom are not, it’s a remarkable potential audience to reach. I’m also hoping people on the board and on the staff are committed to art education, to using the art assets such as MOCA’s collection, its curators, to reach out to people who haven’t had direct access to art. In the strategic statement I prepared for the board there’s a lot of emphasis on building a larger community and outreach.
MAN: What values from the commercial world are not applicable to museum directorship?
JD: In terms of the way I have approached the field, I began as an art critic. My first job after receiving my MBA from Harvard was at a museum. I was a curator at the DeCordova. I’ve always treated the field as an opportunity to get involved in the promotion of analysis or interpretation of art. In certain parts of my career the best way for me to do that was the non-profit sector, and in parts it was working in a corporate structure — when I was co-managing art advisory at Citibank and more recently it’s been at a private art gallery — and now will be at MOCA.
My motivations and interest in connoisseurship, scholarship, doing great exhibitions, projects with artists: It’s all the same. It’s not going to change that much. My values really don’t change. For the past 30 years when I was primarily an art dealer or art adviser, I simply used the market system to support what I was doing, whether it was ambitious independent shows like Post Human, books like our recent monograph on Keith Haring, or public projects like the art parade.
MAN: Funny you mention that. Earlier today I was picturing the art parade going down Grand Avenue.
JD: We’re going to try to bring the art parade to LA! That’s not the first priority, certainly, but that’s something I’d like to do.
Anyway, now I’m looking at art to do something else. My orientation is to try to do amazing things with living artists, to do ambitious, thematic historical shows – that’s always been my motivation and I’ve been training all my life to be able to work on this larger platform as director of a major public museum. The ethic remains the same.
Continued: Part two. Part three.
