Kimerly Rorschach, incoming director of Seattle Art Museum
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been compulsively checking the LA Times‘ Culture Monster to see if its ace arts-reporting team has uncovered anything about what happened at LA MOCA’s special board meeting on Tuesday. (Okay, so you’re probably not compulsively checking that site. That’s what you’ve got CultureGrrl for.)
According to the Times’ Mike Boehm, the meeting was called “to unite trustees whose willingness to donate is vital to reversing recent budget cuts.” Whether the upshot was peace and harmony, or the departure of more dissident board members (or even of controversial director Jeffrey Deitch) is yet to be revealed. The one thing that everyone at the meeting may have agreed on is not to talk to the press.
For news, we’ll have to be content, for now, with this report from Bloomberg‘s Katya Kazakina and Christopher Palmeri:
The Museum of Contemporary Art Los
Angeles isn’t in a party mood this year.The downtown institution, rocked by the departures of board
members, won’t hold a gala in 2012, according to an e-mail today
from the museum. [I didn’t get that memo.] Past events have included performances by Lady Gaga, Beck and Deborah Harry.The annual soiree, usually held in November, has been the
museum’s largest annual fundraiser, tax filings show.
The next big bash will be next spring, date TBA.
I suppose we can always check Eli Broad‘s latest Twitter pronouncement for possible cryptic clues about the MOCA imbroglio:
Meanwhile, Deitch got an implied endorsement from Kimerly Rorschach, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (to which Deitch doesn’t belong), who gave me a did-she-really-say-that? moment in recent comments (linked to on AAMD’s Twitter feed) about The Secret to a Successful Museum (scroll down):
Museums must offer programs and exhibitions that respond to their audience’s interests and help educate them about new topics in the visual arts that will be meaningful in the future [emphasis added]. Museums in Los Angeles have been particularly innovative in this regard, from 2011’s “Pacific Standard Time” programs to MOCA’s graffiti [“Art in the Streets”] exhibition and the upcoming “Fire in the Disco” exhibition.
Gee, there are those of us who think that disco isn’t particularly “meaningful in the present,” let alone “in the future.” The elucidations of graffiti and disco are prime examples of what Deitch’s critics regard as MOCA’s new infatuation, under its current director, with the trendy and trivial.
Kimerly, are you sure you want to go there?
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Derrick Cartwright, the former Seattle Art Museum director whom Rorschach will succeed in November, has been named galleries director (a newly created position) at the institution where he began his professional life as an assistant professor—the University of San Diego. This is a homecoming in more ways than one: Before coming to Seattle, Cartwright was director of the San Diego Museum of Art. He will also be be a professor of practice in USD’s Department of Art, Art History and Architecture.
