Jeffrey Deitch
Mike Boehm of the LA Times expertly moves the reportorial ball down the field today in his interview with Jeffrey Deitch regarding yesterday’s revelations in CultureGrrl.
LA MOCA’s incoming director told Boehm one aspect of Deitch’s plans that I hadn’t learned about during my brief conversation with him after Jeffrey had addresssed an audience at the Guggenheim Museum. (Deitch’s stated plan to sell works from his gallery’s inventory after becoming the museum’s director, as I indicated yesterday, would appear to run smack into the Association of Art Museum Director’s strict
strictures [P. 20, second paragraph] against dealing.)
According to Boehm, Deitch “expects to fold them [the works from his gallery’s inventory] into his personal collection” before he liquidates them. “He said he planned to go on selling some of those—under protocols
previously worked out with MOCA’s board that apply when he sells pieces
from his personal art holdings,” Boehm writes.
That sounds like a kind of inventory-laundering to me: Get it out of the commercial gallery into the personal collection. Then go ahead and monetize it.
Jeffrey also explained to Boehm why he believes that selling these works from his gallery’s inventory (through his personal collection) doesn’t constitute dealing. Deitch stated:
Art dealing is when you’re doing it as a business.
Deitch said he needed the money to cover the cost of shutting down his
business, including breaking leases and keeping financial promises he
made to gallery employees who would be out of a job.
We urgently need to know what AAMD thinks “dealing” is, in the context of its own Code of Ethics. Here’s what Janet Landay, AAMD’s executive director, told me today:
At this point, we have nothing further to add to our previous comments, but continue to monitor the situation.
We don’t need “monitoring.” We need admonishing.
The “previous comments” Landay alludes to in her comment are presumably what the association’s professional issues chairman, Bill Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, had said to me (as reported in my above-linked previous post). Acknowledging that the current guidelines say nothing about whether or under what circumstances directors can
sell, Eiland conceded, “That’s something we need to work on.” I’ll say.
As a refreshing tonic after all this ethical indigestion, read Carol Vogel‘s Q&A with Professor Philippe de Montebello, buried on P. 29 of today’s special Museums section in the NY Times.