Jeffrey Deitch
In the time leading up to assuming his new post at LA MOCA on June 1, New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch should have bent over backwards to dispel doubts about his fitness for the job, by sounding and acting like a museum director.
Instead it appears that you can take Deitch out of his gallery, but you can’t take the dealer out of Deitch.
He recently allowed himself to be quoted as the chief dealers’ spokesperson for this NY Times article by Randy Kennedy about a lawsuit regarding galleries’ blacklists against certain buyers. Jumping into a fray that any museum director would have prudently stayed clear of, Deitch expressed his strong hostility towards certain collectors, who “humiliate us” by “manipulation.” Directors are supposed to court collectors, not antagonize them. This is baggage that Deitch shouldn’t bring to LA.
And at the recent Christie’s evening contemporary art sale, where I saw him with a bidder’s paddle, Judd Tully of ArtInfo saw him using it, buying a Gerhard Richter for $2.32 million. Deitch seems determined to play the dealer till the end (if not past the end) of his commercial run. It’s possible (but unlikely) that he was bidding for LA MOCA on the Richter. But in that case, the acquisition would have probably been announced by now.
Not only has Deitch shown no inclination to shed his dealer’s persona, but for the first show that he’s bringing to Los Angeles, he has decided to bypass his own museum’s (or any museum’s) curators, relying instead on an artist, Julian Schnabel, and two dealers, Fred Hoffman of Santa Monica and Tony Shafrazi of New York, to curate and help organize “Dennis Hopper Double Standard,” July 11-Sept. 26, “the first comprehensive survey exhibition of
Dennis Hopper’s artistic career to be mounted by a North American museum,” as described in the press
release that hit my inbox yesterday.
Better known for his film work, Hopper does have a fairly extensive exhibition
history for his visual-arts oeuvre. His 1997 show at Hoffman’s gallery got a lukewarm review in the LA Times. (His most recent LA show was at Ace Gallery in 2006.)
Hoffman is listed as “curatorial consultant” for the upcoming museum exhibition. He previously was an adjunct curator for LA MOCA’s showing of a Basquiat retrospective organized by the Brooklyn Museum.
The press release ends with this unusual homage to the other dealer involved:
The museum thanks Tony Shafrazi and Tony Shafrazi Gallery for their dedicated collaboration in realizing the exhibition.
Shafrazi is selling through his gallery website a new $700 tome, Dennis Hopper Photographs: 1961-1967, edited by Shafrazi and “limited to 1,500 numbered copies, signed by Dennis Hopper.”
There was also some old news in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Deitch’s having engaged in conduct-unbecoming-a-director. This related to a viral video (which I first saw two weeks ago) that shows him going ballistic at someone who had accidently crashed into him during the opening of his swan song as a gallerist, the current Shepard Fairey show at Deitch Projects (which has engendered its own share of controversy).
I elected not to embed that video on CultureGrrl, partly because it was a cheap shot that would weaken my serious critique of Deitch’s appointment. Also, truth be told, I sympathized: I had recently been knocked down hard in the pre-theater scrum by someone who wasn’t looking where she was going, landing me flat on my back in the middle of the street (not the sidewalk) on 8th Avenue. (Fortunately, I passed this very good bone-density test.) If I had been able to say something at that moment to that miscreant (who just kept on going), I would likely have sounded very like Jeffrey (possibly without the f-word).
The WSJ embedded the vituperative video in another place on its website, but I’ll let you search for it yourself.
On a more serious journalistic note, Jori Finkel of the LA Times has more on MOCA’s Hopper show, here and here.