"Museum’s New Identity Causes More Fallout" via Notes from the Bass Museum by George Lindemann Jr

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Published: July 13, 2012

Two weeks after the unexpected departure of the chief curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, battle lines are being drawn over the direction of that influential but long-beleaguered institution.

 
John Baldessari, who’s leaving the museum’s board.
Jason Redmond/Reuters
 
 
Jeffrey Deitch, the museum’s director
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

John Baldessari, a highly respected artist and a dean of the Los Angeles art world, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the museum’s board, partly as a result of the resignation of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s longtime chief curator and an architect of many of its most important shows.

Mr. Schimmel resigned under pressure in late June after months of increasing tension with the museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York gallery owner who took over in 2010 with a more pop-culture-oriented vision of the museum’s mission and a mandate to expand its audience.

Mr. Deitch was chosen as the museum was emerging from financial turmoil. And his selection was seen in the art world as an ideological shift: a demonstration of the increasingly blurry line between the commercial and museum worlds, of a growing desire among some museums to experiment with more populist programming, and of changing views about how younger audiences define art.

The first show that Mr. Deitch conceived after he arrived, a rapidly organized survey of the work of the actor Dennis Hopper, who was dying of cancer at the time, established a critical dynamic that has often been replayed. Christopher Knight, in a review in The Los Angeles Times, called the Hopper show mediocre, filled with the kind of “mostly listless art” that would not help to dig a serious institution out of its troubles.

“Art in the Streets,” a historical survey of graffiti and street art organized by Mr. Deitch, fared better critically and attracted more than 200,000 visitors during its run of almost five months in 2011, helping the museum to double its attendance that year to more than 400,000. And other shows initiated by Mr. Deitch have cut against a straightforward perception of him as showy impresario, including a current well-received exhibition of the Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho.

But four other board members have preceded Mr. Baldessari in leaving the board this year, and, in a letter to The Los Angeles Times this week, four nonvoting board members wrote that what they called Mr. Deitch’s “celebrity-driven program” was not the right way to make the museum relevant.

In a phone interview Mr. Baldessari said he had decided to step down from the board, which he had been little involved with since Mr. Deitch’s appointment, because he saw it as being pervaded by a “kind of entertainment mentality — this way of putting something up the flagpole to see who salutes.”

As an example of what he called an embrace of pop culture with too little critical distance, he mentioned a large exhibition being planned by Mr. Deitch that will explore the influence of disco culture on the visual arts and performance art.

Mr. Schimmel’s departure was a tipping point, he said, in which “MOCA was going to become something else, whether I liked it or not.” Of the museum’s overall direction, he added: “It also makes me think that I’m a dinosaur, and Jeffrey Deitch and his ideas may be the future. But I don’t like it.”

Mr. Deitch, who declined to comment about Mr. Baldessari’s stepping down, appears to have the continued strong support of the museum’s leadership. Maria Arena Bell and David G. Johnson, who are the board’s chairwoman and chairman, issued a statement on Friday, saying, “There is a paradigm shift happening today, and both art and its audience are changing.”

Mr. Deitch, they wrote, “came here to bring us into this new era, and we are 100 percent behind him and his vision for that.” Ms. Bell and Mr. Johnson added that they saw Mr. Deitch’s overall vision as a “balanced program,” with historical exhibitions, projects with established and emerging contemporary artists and “innovative exhibitions that engage the public in a dynamic way.”

Eli Broad, the collector and philanthropist whose foundation stepped in to save the museum from insolvency in 2008 after its endowment was used to pay operating expenses, continues to exert considerable influence over the museum’s decisions and has consistently supported Mr. Deitch.

But many curators and others in the art world have regarded Mr. Broad’s measure of museum success or failure with a degree of alarm. In an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times after Mr. Schimmel’s departure, Mr. Broad wrote that over the museum’s history it had mounted a number of shows that cost too much and were attended by too few — a problem he described in precise accounting terms, citing exhibitions “exceeding $100 per visitor.”

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, cautioned in an online forum recently that such a box office view of art patronage threatened to narrow the ambitions of museums.

“We have to change course to a research, education and experiential impact focus and away from obsessing about ‘the gate’ — which represents less than 5 percent of our revenue nationally,” Mr. Anderson wrote. “It’s up to museum professionals to change the topic and measure what we know matters, not what’s easy to measure.”

 

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"A Cattelan Billboard for the High Line" in @nytimes

Courtesy the artists and Friends of the High Line

A rendering of the High Line billboard by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

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Published: May 31, 2012

After his blockbuster retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last fall, Maurizio Cattelan, who is just 51, said he was officially retiring from making art. What did that mean, exactly, coming from a jokester like Mr. Cattelan?

One answer comes in the form of a billboard, 75 by 25 feet, at 10th Avenue and West 18th Street in Chelsea, next to the High Line. It is a giant image of a woman’s 10 perfectly manicured and jeweled fingers, detached from their hands, emerging from a vibrant blue velvet background. It was unveiled on Thursday and can be seen from both the elevated pathway and the street.

The billboard is part of a High Line series that began last December with “The First $100,000 I Ever Made,” a blown-up photograph of a real $100,000 bill, the largest denomination the United States government ever printed, by the Los Angeles artist John Baldessari. This new billboard — the fourth — will be on view through June 30.

Mr. Cattelan created the image with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari as part of Toilet Paper, a two-year-old art magazine founded by the two men.

But what about Mr. Cattelan’s supposed retirement? “It’s not like it’s my own,” he said, laughing, about the billboard. “We worked together.” He explained that he is “in between moments,” adding, “I’m missing it, but it’s good to have distance.”

The billboard’s photograph was taken in Milan, and while Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Pierpaolo held casting sessions to find just the pair of hands to shoot, Mr. Cattelan said they happened on an old woman in a bar near the sessions and asked her to pose.

“It’s like a magic trick,” said Cecilia Alemani, director of the public art program at Friends of the High Line. “It’s almost cinematic in its format.”

Mr. Cattelan called the image “Surreal but verging on Pop,” adding that “it’s a bit gory but without the blood.”

But why show just those fingers and not the rest of the hand? “Fingers are something sexual, like penises,” he explained. “It doesn’t always have to be a cigar.”