Art Vent

Letting the Fresh Air In

Jeffrey Deitch

Art Vent Letting the Fresh Air In

August 5, 2012

Swingeing London by Richard Hamilton, 1968-9, showing Rolling Stone Mick Jagger in the back of a police car. © Estate of Richard Hamilton.

Other than making my own, it’s nearly impossible for me to care about art in August. This is when nature is at it’s fullest, and very hard to compete with. Besides, it’s too hot. I mean, who the fuck cares? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these days, the best art comes out of cities like Berlin, New York, and London—as opposed to Paris and Rome—places where you need art to improve on things. Places where, if you didn’t have art, you might go crazy. In the recent documentary, Gerhard Richter calls Cologne, where he lives, an ugly city.  But maybe he needs that. Maybe Cologne is the perfect foil.

It’s never too hot for gossip and controversy, however, and right now L.A.’s MOCA is providing us with a steady stream of both. Today the L.A. Times published an articlein defense of Director Jeffrey Deitch, who recently fired—or allowed the Board of Trustees to fire—long-time curator Paul Schimmel resulting in great art world sturm und drang (see post below as well). Unfortunately, the “defenders” quoted in the article are hardly financially disinterested: Aaron Rose, who co-curated “Art in the Streets” at MOCA with Deitch, and Shepard Fairey, who has been hired by Deitch to create a graphic identity for the museum. Under those circumstances, what can they be expected to say? That Deitch is full of shit?

This article and, really, everything that’s been written about the situation, makes it sound as if the issues are (blah blah, I’m so tired of it) celebrity-driven “pop” culture, intended to introduce a “new” audience and bring in crowds, versus “serious” programming, which is, ipso facto, “old culture,” for aficionados only, and crushingly boring. Yet there is a middle ground, as exemplified by the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, which somehow manage to attract the world's largest audiences for contemporary art, without sacrificing rigor. And MoMA is packed.

On Deitch-as-curator, my feelings are mixed. By all accounts, “Art in the Streets” was great and I'm sorry it didn't travel to the Brooklyn Museum, as planned. Nor do I have an aversion to the idea of a disco-themed exhibition, done properly. I’m also a big fan of Shepard Fairey, and if I could hire him to create my graphic identity, I would. But to choose to mount not only a Dennis Hopper exhibition, but a James Dean theme show, curated by James Franco, while cancelling mid-stream those of Jack Goldstein and Richard Hamilton—two historic but under-recognized artists whose work would fit perfectly into the MOCA agenda—seems unconscionable. Oh, and did I mention the upcoming Jeff Koonsretrospective? Now there’s an artist who needs more attention….

However, none of this means anything. Deitch was hired to be a director, not curator, and the real reason he should go is that he’s proved to be a terrible manager. This whole debacle is a P.R. nightmare of his making. Basically, a director’s job is to create good will and faith in the museum, inside and out, in addition to raising the money to keep it going. It is important that donors feel confident that the museum is being run well, is going to last, and that they‘re not contributing to a vanity project of the principle donor, in this case, Eli Broad. It would seem now that the only direction the museum can take to regain credibility and confidence is to dump Deitch, tell Broad to step back, hire a strong director, and start fresh.

July 18, 2012

After ranting about the Art Institute of Chicago’s restaurant choices: the reservations-only, pretentiously-named Terzo Piano, which provides “signature cuisine” for the 1%, or the downstairs Museum Café, with pizza, burgers, and plastic dinnerware for the rest of us plebes, I was pleased to read this quote, in The New Yorker’s recent profileof Tate Modern director Nick Serota:  “We did a survey of about forty artists before we began….We thought that if we could make spaces in which artists liked to show their work, then the public would also respond to them—we wanted spaces that the public would feel comfortable in. For example, it was a very deliberate decision to make this [the café] a good restaurant, but not a high-end one.”


Meanwhile all of the artist members—John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha—of the board of directors at L.A.’s MOCA have quit.


“To live with my conscience, I just had to do it." Baldessari said in an interview Thursday after emailing his decision to MOCA. He said his reasons include the recent ouster of respected chief curator Paul Schimmel and news this week that the pop-cultural slant the museum has taken under director Jeffrey Deitch will continue with an exhibition on discomusic's influence on art and culture.

“When I heard about that disco show I had to read it twice. At first I thought 'this is a joke' but I realized, no, this is serious. That just reaffirmed my decision.


“That disco show” refers to an upcoming exhibition—no date yet set—that will examine the supposed cultural impact of discomusic on art, fashion and music. It will be co-curated (who is the other curator? Deitch?) by James Murphy of the band, LCD Soundsystem, which broke up last year at the peak of its massive success because, Murphy said, "It was living a life that nobody would live forever."


Although I’ve been a huge LCD Soundsystem fan and will probably regret for the rest of my life not having seen them live, I want to point out that James Murphy was in grammar school during the disco era while, to borrow a phrase from one of LCD’s best songs, I was there.


I was there and disco was not anything artists were interested in. In fact, it was a pejorative word. Disco was AM radio, the boroughs, and secretaries on their nights off, when we were into punk, New Wave, ska, and funk. Studio 54, Warhol and Bianca, was stuff we read about in the Post gossip columns, and besides, Warhol was old by then, in his middle 40s, a veritable éminence grise—while we had CBGB, Danceteria, Area (where the theme changed every month), the Pyramid, 8BC and, in its marvelous decrepitude, the World. No one had any desire to go above 14th Street or wear a polyester suit. My record collection didn’t include Donna Summer, Barry White, the Bee Gees or the Jacksons but James Brown, George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic, Blondie, the Velvet Underground, the English Beat, the Sex  Pistols, the Clash, and the Dead Kennedys. I loved “Saturday Night Fever” but it didn’t have anything to do with me. I put on the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” to get myself up and out the door to work.


It was also a time when artists and writers called the shots in the art world—not businessmen.


My concern about the disco show isn’t the pop culture aspect, but that it could end up being a simplification rather than a clarification of history, a glamorized, homogenized, Mad Men-esque perspective of a complex time.  We have only Deitch’s track record so far to go on: by all accounts his 2011 “Art in the Streets” was the show of the year (that I didn’t see it is another big regret, as Street Art is a major interest of mine), while his current James Dean exhibition, curated by James Franco, as well as his first venture, photographs by Dennis Hopper, seem to have been critical flops. And the now infamous Marina Abramovic performance/dinner, was simply appalling.


A bigger issue, however, is the way the firing (framed as a “resignation”) of Paul Schimmel was handled—by the head of the board of directors, yet—and that it may signal the complete takeover of museums, like everything else, by self-interested moneymen (be sure to read more here). It also seems as if the artist members of the board were left in the dark, which alone would be reason to quit.  


Of course if the director curates, the museum doesn’t have to pay a curator—which is a good thing, because Deitch and Broad will have a hard time finding a decent curator who will work for them after this.


At the same time, it’s important to be open to change, and who knows? Maybe the disco show will be great.


It makes me think of other famous art world walkouts like (I wasn’t there) when Sidney Janis introduced Pop Art with his international “New Realists” exhibition (among the 54 artists shown: Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Richard Lindner, Wayne Thiebaud, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Yves Klein, Arman,  and Christo) prompting a dramatic exodus from the gallery by AbExer’s Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Robert Motherwell (only de Kooning stayed on).


And when I came from Chicago to work at Artforum in 1976, smoke was still hovering from the Lynda Benglis scandal, over an ad for which she posed nude with a gold-plated dildo, an event that caused Contributing Editors Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson to quit and three others, Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Joseph Masheck, to write a letter to the editor, then John Coplans, protesting this “object of extreme vulgarity”—which just looks funny now.


I refuse to make predictions. Back in the day, an acquaintance from Australia told me about a band called the Bee Gees, who were “really great” and I said, “With a stupid name like that, they won’t get anywhere.” 




Update 7/22/12: Another POV here. 7/23/12 Roberta Smith on the debacle here. Even more here. This is almost as good as Downton Abbey. And now Rob Storr weighs in.