A Los Angeles Art Museum Commits Suicide
The crackup at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles—with glitz-blitz director Jeffrey Deitch on the ropes and famous artists resigning from the board as fast as you can say John-Baldessari-Barbara-Kruger-Ed-Ruscha—is a fascination. The fascination has nothing to do with what Deitch has actually done. His decision to mount shows dedicated to graffiti and disco and to encourage the resignation of Paul Schimmel, a widely respected curator, are exactly what I would have expected from Deitch, who only two years ago was operating Deitch Projects in New York, a commercial gallery that featured skateboard culture and a methamphetamine lab. What is fascinating about the MOCA mess is how many people are saying: “Enough!” I would not have predicted that kind of reaction, for the simple reason that all Deitch has been doing is what a lot of other people in the contemporary museum world have been doing. He just executes the same moves with a slightly sharper attack. Could it be that we have arrived at a moment of truth?
Let’s leave aside all the gory details of the MOCA story. Too much has been written about MOCA’s perilous financial state, the influence of art mogul Eli Broad, and Deitch’s particular odyssey from financial advisor to art dealer to museum director. Museums are always in need of money, the super rich are always throwing their weight around, and changing one’s professional hat, as Deitch has done, is not a sin. MOCA, Deitch, and Broad are part of a much larger catastrophe, a catastrophe that began in the last years of the last century, when Thomas Krens mounted a show at the Guggenheim in New York called “The Art of the Motorcycle.” Krens filled the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda with motorcycles, and mused at the press preview that he might or might not ride his own bike up the ramp. Don’t get me wrong. Motorcycles are beautiful. But “The Art of the Motorcycle” was not really about motorcycles. Krens was telling the world that all cultural institutions are pop culture institutions. He was a populist demagogue with an Upper East Side pulpit. He was preaching to the Wall Street types who were hankering for some cultural glamour, telling them it didn’t matter if they didn’t know or care what distinguished a Mondrian from a Kandinsky. Krens has been swept aside. But his message—make it dumb and then make it dumber—has been resonating around the world, from the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern to the Jeff Koons show on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum to Jeffrey Deitch’s tenure at MOCA. The question is not pop culture versus high culture. We live in a world where there are many opportunities to experience pop culture and many fewer opportunities to experience painting and sculpture. In a wealthy society—and recession or no, this remains a wealthy society—why can’t there be a place dedicated to Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko, and Pollock? Is that such a sin?