Wish you could have been a fly on the wall of today’s Jeffrey Deitch roll-out at LA MOCA?
Now you can!
Having flown in for Monday’s press conference, and flown out when it got postponed (just kidding about my travels!), I asked the museum’s press people if they had any audio, video or transcript of today’s proceedings. Nothin’ doing.
But thanks to the iconoclastic Coagula Art Journal, the event has been immortalized on YouTube (along with some snarky annotations). In case you were afraid you had missed something important, you will be relieve to know that nothing substantive was said. At one point, the camera rests on chief curator Paul Schimmel, listening in the audience to Councilwoman Jan Perry. When Jeffrey finishes speaking, you’ll see him cast a sidelong glance at Eli Broad, as if to check whether he did okay.
The conclave should have been termed a “press announcement,” not a “press conference.” As LA Times art critic Christopher Knight reported on his Twitter page, “Surprisingly, no questions were taken from the assembled throng.” But some were granted one-on-ones with Deitch after his brief remarks.
Why did they shy away from a group question session? Perhaps because some of these issues might have been probed, at an event that was meant to be celebratory and mutually congratulatory: