BlogBack: Michael Brand Replies to “Getty Gets Contemporary”

No this is not the Getty post you’ve been breathlessly awaiting—my fulminations about yesterday’s report by the California Attorney General office on its lengthy investigation. CultureGrrl will let loose on that subject tomorrow. That deficient report, e-mailed on Yom Kippur when I couldn’t read it, was certainly consistent with the forgiving spirit of the Jewish holiday on which it was issued.
No, this is a good-natured debate on another matter. The Getty Museum’s blameless new director, Michael Brand, focused (as he should be) on the real work of the institution going forward, has just blogged back on my recent post about the Getty’s contemporary art plans:
I feel obliged to respond to your comments about works by Tim Hawkinson and Gerhard Richter coming soon to the J. Paul Getty Museum.
First of all, I believe Tim Hawkinson (along with many others in the art world) would be legitimately surprised to hear that neither his “Überorgan” (not previously displayed on the West Coast) nor four newly commissioned works warrant West Coast exposure.
With respect to the exhibition “From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden,” rather than being the result of what you call “a lack of curatorial enterprise and imagination,” the selection of the 12 Richter paintings you refer to was actually made at the suggestion of Mr. Richter himself—examples of his recent work that he feels are the most interesting in comparison to paintings by Friedrich. In addition, he renamed them “Wald” in light of this connection to Friedrich. They were included in our exhibition before they were purchased by or promised to MoMA.