Journalists (including me) extracted only minimal information from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s press office about the “minimal” damage suffered by Warhol‘s celebrated “Triple Elvis [Ferus type],” 1963, on 100-year loan from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection.
But Neal Benezra, the museum’s director, was more forthcoming when I caught up with him last week in New York at the press preview for the exhilaratingly eclectic, must-see Bruce Conner retrospective, premiering at the Museum of Modern Art (to Oct. 2), before traveling to SFMOMA, which organized it (Oct. 29-Jan. 22), and then to the Reina Sofia, Madrid (Feb. 21-May 22).
Neal Benezra chatting with Tom Freudenheim, the Smithonian Institution’s former assistant secretary for museums, at MoMA’s Bruce Conner press preview Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Neal told me that there hadn’t been any significant problems since his expanded and renovated museum reopened last month. So I indiscreetly brought up the Elvis fracas, which I had learned about and tweeted about during my visit to SFMOMA, the day after The King had temporarily left the gallery (if not the building).
Here’s what Benezra had to say about the incident:
This is much ado about not much. There was a guard in the room and a woman was having her picture taken, like a lot of people do. She just slipped and fell. I think it was her elbow that went into one of the six knees of the three Elvises. [He later said it made contact with a knee of the middle Elvis.]
I mentioned I had thought (as I speculated here) that the fall might have resulted from someone’s backing up towards the painting to take a selfie, and tripping on the platform that juts out from the bottom of the wall. The platform’s purpose is to unobtrusively keep some distance between visitors and the paintings.
Benezra denied that the platform had anything to do with this accident but added, “You’re right. Selfies are trouble.”
If so, is there still time to stop that runaway train, or is it already too far out of the station?
