MOCA”s Geffen Contemporary facility
In my last post on the MOCA Mess, I decried the “low profile” of Jeffrey Deitch, the museum’s embattled and under-performing director, at a tumultuous time when confidence-inspiring leadership was desperately needed.
I wrote:
As the serious criticism relentlessly piles up from within MOCA’s ranks and from outside commentators, MOCA needs to address this mushrooming crisis of confidence head-on. Director Jeffrey Deitch has kept a low profile throughout this firestorm, ceding his responsibility as the voice of the institution to life trustee Eli Broad.
He now needs to act quickly, decisively and responsibly to restore
public trust and artworld confidence [emphasis added] or else fold his party tent.
Now, on the same day that the LA Times published a platitudinous, mild-mannered editorial in the LA Times—The Mess at MOCA—which called on the museum’s disturbingly silent director to “articulate a clear vision for the museum’s future,” Deitch has come out of hiding with a statement published on his museum’s blog, “The Curve”:
We would like to reassure you of our commitment to extending MOCA’s legacy and international
reputation as a preeminent contemporary art institution, to fulfilling
the museum’s mission, and to ensuring that it has a secure future both
financially and artistically….MOCA will present a balanced and ambitious exhibition program of both
established and emerging artists, and will continue to engage growing
international and local audiences and our valued supporters in a dynamic
and scholarly way.
I guess we’ll have to take his word for it. Unfortunately, the link he supplied to two upcoming MOCA exhibitions provides no information about them, other than a few images of works in those shows. (There’s also nothing about them, at this writing, on the museum’s webpage for press releases.) One of them, “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962,” is an exhibition that was being planned by the museum’s exiled chief curator Paul Schimmel, who is expected to continue working on it, according to the museum’s announcement of his departure.
Deitch thus far has not answered journalists’ queries regarding the MOCA crisis, letting life trustee and megabucks donor Eli Broad speak for him, and refusing an invitation to join Christopher Knight, Robert Storr and me
on Warren Olney‘s recent KCRW “Which Way, LA?” segment on The Future of MOCA.
In today’s blog posts, Deitch did not address the recommendation made today by the LA Times that he seek new artist-members to replace the four who defected from MOCA’s board, as well as a replacement for Schimmel. (The current plan is for Deitch himself to take on the chief curator’s former duties.)
The problem with trying to repair MOCA’s frayed connections with the artistic and curatorial communities is that those in the artworld who decry the recent turn of events may decline to come on board under the current besieged regime.