The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” show.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Maybe two out of three isn’t bad. Los Angeles has gotten two quite effective museum directors from New York. Ann Philbin went from the Drawing Center to head the Hammer Museum. Michael Govan went from the Dia Art Foundation to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both seem to be doing swimmingly.

Published: July 22, 2012 

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles since 2010.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Art in the Streets,” mounted at the museum in 2011, focused on graffiti art and skateboard culture, including special coverage of the Los Angeles scene.

But a much rougher time is being had by the third, Jeffrey Deitch, who closed his SoHo gallery in the spring of 2010 to become director of theMuseum of Contemporary Art, an institution with an enviable curatorial record but historically plagued by financial problems. Criticism about his tenure has been constant, but has intensified over the last three and a half weeks in the wake of the departure under pressure of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s brilliant, headstrong chief curator, after a vote by the trustees. The chemistry between the two men was known to be troubled.

Even more disturbing than Mr. Schimmel’s leaving after 22 years was news that his position would not be filled and that the museum would rely more on freelance curators. Around the same time there was increasing talk in both the press and the art world of Mr. Deitch’s problems in fund-raising.

And then came word that an exhibition about art and disco was in development. Complaints escalated that Mr. Deitch was emphasizing populist entertainment and glitz at the expense of the scholarly rigor associated with Mr. Schimmel. The next week or so brought the resignations of all four artist-trustees: John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha.

The museum, which counted artists among its most active founders, has always had them on its board. In a sense their loss was as shocking as anything that came before, because it signaled in the extreme a loss of faith on the part of artists. Mr. Deitch’s tenure as director has so far been a disappointment even to the people who thought it was a feasible idea in the first place, of whom I was one.

I considered it “a brilliant stroke,” I wrote at the time, calling it an example of a museum thinking outside the box, and also an appropriately desperate measure for desperate times. The museum had come close to collapse in 2008 after drawing its endowment down to $5 million (it was once around $40 million), and there was talk of selling the collection or merging with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That threat was averted by the real estate developer and cultural philanthropist Eli Broad, a founding trustee of the museum, who returned to the museum’s board after a 15-year hiatus and donated a $30 million bailout, and then had a big hand in Mr. Deitch’s appointment.

I didn’t buy the idea that someone from the gallery world cannot cross over into the museum sphere or that advanced degrees in art history are essential, and I still don’t. It was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that given Mr. Deitch’s wide art world experience he could have met the challenge of a big museum. But instead of redefining himself in a bid to do that, he seems to have redefined the job.

Rather than encourage and cultivate curators much the way an art dealer encourages and cultivates artists, he has frequently chosen to assume the role of curator himself, when he wasn’t commissioning celebrities to do it. He started with an exhibition devoted to photographs and other artworks by the actor Dennis Hopper organized by Julian Schnabel, then staged an off-site show about James Dean organized by James Franco. His 2011 “Art in the Streets” exhibition, although better received by critics and very well-attended, didn’t help establish a serious tone. And it included several artists whom Mr. Deitch had represented as an art dealer — at-best a sloppy-looking overlap between his former role as a dealer and his current one as a custodian of a public institution.

For all his missteps, though, it is much too simplistic to blame Mr. Deitch alone for the air of crisis that now surrounds the museum. He has certainly hurt its image and he has failed to make much of a dent in its more urgent financial problems. But he did not create those. They preceded him by many years and are part of a tortuous history with many players. The museum has long been financially fragile; its board has rarely provided the kind of financial support that an institution of its quality requires and deserves. It continues not to, which brings us back to Mr. Broad.

His bailout of the museum four years ago gave him a dominance on the board that caused some trustees to leave and suggested to many people the possibility that his bailout might someday morph into a takeover that would merge the museum’s exemplary collection of art with his own, more predictable, market-driven one. It didn’t help that within months of Mr. Deitch’s appointment Mr. Broad finalized plans to build his own museum across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, now scheduled to open within a year or two.

Given Mr. Broad’s fraught history with other Los Angeles museums, his denials about taking over this one remain hard to trust. In an interview in The Los Angeles Times he said, “If I wanted to do that, why would I have saved MOCA?” But he hasn’t so much saved it as staved off its demise, and without more money either from him or other trustees, the place is more or less on life-support. (It is interesting to note that its $14.3 million budget for the fiscal year 2011 is a little below the $16 million of the Hammer, a museum with roughly one-quarter its gallery space. And yet, while the Museum of Contemporary Art’s staff has been whittled down to a skeletal 45, the Hammer has 95.)

Meanwhile a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Mr. Broad contributed to a widespread and unhelpful binary view of the situation, calling the museum’s great exhibitions of the past “insular” and Mr. Deitch’s vision “populist,” a gross simplification and misrepresentation on both counts. Mr. Broad also cited attendance as a sign of a show’s success, a very limited idea of the cultural benefits of museums to say the least.

Whether or not Mr. Deitch was the best person for the job now seems largely moot. He is the one who said yes, who showed up and has thrown himself into what may actually be a kind of mission impossible, with or without his many errors in judgment. At this point he, Mr. Broad and the other trustees only have one another. They have got to make it work. The main way for this to happen is for the other board members to step up to the plate and give enough money to counterbalance Mr. Broad’s contributions and his views. You can’t have a one-person board any more than you can have a one-person museum.

For his part Mr. Deitch has to become a real museum director. He has to stop organizing exhibitions — in part to create more of a firewall between his new job and his previous identity. He has to hone his fund-raising skills and hire and cultivate curators, including, as The Los Angeles Times said in an editorial on Friday, a new chief curator — which of course will take money.

And although one can be grateful for the wake-up call delivered by the departures of the four artist-trustees, artists need to reassert themselves in the life of this museum. They have the numbers and the clout to make a difference. Above all they have the vision. The Los Angeles cultural world cannot turn its back on an institution that has been so central to its stature as one of the world’s greatest art capitals.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support.

By RANDY KENNEDY

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.”

 

(CBS News) Two decades after Morley Safer took a critical look at contemporary art in his 60 Minutes story "Yes...But is it Art?" he has found the definitive answer to his snide question: Does it matter what it is if it appreciates in value by a thousand-fold? Safer learns this at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami's premier contemporary art fair, where he reports on the boom in contemporary art, a market that's defying the world economic slump and outperformed stocks. Safer's story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, April 1 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

 

Jeffrey Deitch, a former dealer and now the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has a long memory and can't resist ribbing Safer. "In the art world, we remember very well that famous program that you did 20 years ago...it was almost a send-up of the contemporary art market," he tells Safer. One of the objects of Safer's critical eye back then was a Jeff Koons installation called "Equilibrium," consisting of three basketballs suspended in an aquarium. Koons' works have greatly appreciated. "I think [at] the time we were talking Jeff Koons was very well sold for $250,000," says Deitch. "As you know now, Jeff Koons' works have gone for $25 million or more."

 

Last year, sales of contemporary art reached $5.5 billion, just for auctioned works. Billions more probably changed hands at regularly held shows like Art Basel Miami Beach. The contemporary art market has outperformed the Standard & Poor's list of 500 common stocks since 2003.

 

60 Minutes cameras capture the rich buyers and the art works on sale at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most important art fairs held in what is now considered an art capital of the world. Some of the works might pose a quandary for the uninitiated. Among the paintings and sculptures are works incorporating bathroom fixtures and extension cords, works that make noises, works incorporating video. The pieces have no price tags; their worth is negotiable.

 

Foreign money is one factor driving the market. Gallery owner Larry Gagosian says, "I think the wealth in Russia, the Middle East, Asia has changed [the market]...dramatically." Art fairs are now the place to be for people like Gagosian. "The art fair has become a huge part of our business," he tells Safer.

 

Anything can happen in a market comprised of original, one-of-a kind merchandise and billionaires willing to bet monumental sums of money on them. Gallery owner Tim Blum says, "It's the Wild West. This is not a normal retail business. It's an unregulated, utterly bizarre place to conduct business." What sustains it against the odds? "It's inexplicable...almost unexplainable...When we bring it up...begin to talk about it, we sort of drop the subject," says Blum. "Because it almost feels like you should just let it... keep rolling."