Jeffrey Deitch steps down from MOCA directorship

Jeffrey Deitch has finally announced he will be stepping down after three years as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The official news release says he will be stay on for an unspecified time to ensure a smooth transition and the successful completion of MOCA's $100 million dollar endowment campaign, expected to close this fall. Now attention turns to the search for his successor.
Image: Jeffrey Deitch, outgoing director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 

Roberta Smith on LA MOCA, a museum that has achieved greatness without ever quite figuring out how to pay for it

The trustees of LA MOCA say they will not hand over their institution to others - notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - and will instead raise the funds required for the museum to remain independent. The announcement has fueled speculation on billionaire collector Eli Broad's part in the saga. Broad is reported to have a special interest in the success of MOCA because he is building his own museum right across the street. Roberta Smith picks up the story in the New York Times. Read more...

Image: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

MOCA merger plot twist

Last week the LA art world was debating the pros and cons of a possible merger between LA MOCA and LACMA. Now the NYT reports the financially-troubled museum may be close to working out a five year agreement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington to collaborate on programming, research and exhibitions. Any agreement would not include financial or fundraising assistance, leaving MOCA's fiscal problems unsolved, but an agreement could help lift its fundraising efforts and ward off a merger with LACMA.

The  approach to the National Gallery was made by Eli Broad, the billionaire collector who bailed out MOCA in 2008. He is reported to have a special interest in the success of MOCA because he is building his own museum right across the street. For the moment he appears to have derailed the possibility of a merger with LACMA. Read more...
Image: The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

LACMA announces plan to take over LA MOCA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced a plan to take over the financially troubled LA MOCA, but it may require the approval of billionaire collector Eli Broad. His $30m bailout of MOCA in 2008 was on condition that it may not be acquired by another museum within 100 miles within the next 10 years. You can read the merger proposal here.

Jeffrey Deitch predicts the future of LA museum audiences

As his so-called celebrity-driven, populist programme at MOCA continues to divide the LA artworld Jeffrey Deitch has come out on the front foot saying he has seen the future of museum audiences and they will look a lot different from the old guard at MOCA. "They're not people who make a living as artists, art critics or professional collectors, which is the traditional MOCA audience. These are people who hear about a great new film they want to go to. They hear there's a terrific fashion store that's very cool - they want to go there. They don't differentiate between these cultural forms." Read more...
Image: Jeffrey Deitch and Naomi Campbell

Former MOCA chief executive urges Eli Broad to remove Jeffrey Deitch

In an email sent to Eli Broad and obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Charles Young, the former chief executive of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has called for the removal of museum director Jeffrey Deitch.

"I hope that the four-alarm fire now enveloping MOCA has at least given you pause for thought about his appointment and your continued attempts to try to save him for a job which many (including myself) believe he is unqualified," Young wrote to Broad. "The resignation of dedicated, long term trustees, and especially four highly respected artists of international acclaim, should bother you, David [Johnson], Maria [Bell] and the other continuing members of the board. The question is 'What now is to be done?'"

"I will do anything I can to try to right the MOCA ship, but nothing will work, in my mind, without a new Captain/Director," Young concluded. Read more...
Image: Charles Young, former chief executive of MOMA and former UCLA chancellor

Roberta Smith's take on the MOCA meltdown

In her NYT article A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support, Roberta Smith says Jeffrey Deitch needs to stop organising exhibitions and learn to be a museum director, Trustees need to step up and give more more money to counterbalance Eli Broad's influence and views, and artists need to reassert themselves in the life of the museum. Read more...
Image: MOCA's Art in the Streets exhibition

Jeffrey Deitch reponds to his critics

Jeffrey Deitch has defended his exhibition record at MOCA and dismissed suggestions by some board members, including in an open letter published in the New York Times, that the museum has lost its artistic bearings under his directorship and is increasingly under the control of billionaire collector and philanthropist Eli Broad. Read more...
Image: Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

The MOCA meltdown as "an apt metaphor for our crisis-plagued times"

In an ARTINFO article, Ben Davis traces the troubled history of MOCA from the days of 2008 when its financial problems first came into the open and Eli Broad stepped in to save the museum. Now he says the rescue appears to be an example of pursing a solution that has nothing to do with the real problem, and is more of a pet ideological problem of one man, Eli Broad. Davis says MOCA had a finances problem, not a curatorial problem and that tackling the wrong problem in the wrong way has hurt MOCA 's chances of setting itself right in the long run. Read more...
Image: Eli Broad and Jeffrey Deitch

MOCA's troubles intensify with the resignation of all four artists on the museum board

All four artists on MOCA's board of trustees have resigned, raising further questions about the direction the museum is taking under the directorship of Jeffrey Deitch. John Baldessari was the first to go, followed by Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger. "Parties and galas are OK, but sometimes these things called museums have to have things called exhibitions," the two artists wrote. "Our concerns are with the art, the exhibitions and how the money that makes exhibitions possible is gathered and distributed. Our concern is for a continued curatorial practice that is both rigorously complex and pleasurably awesome." (You can read the full version of their resignation letter here.) And on Sunday Ed Ruscha resigned leaving the board without any artist representatives.
Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

MOCA's disco show is a bridge too far for John Baldessari

John Baldessari has stepped down from the board of the LA's Museum of Contemporary Art. He said his reasons include the recent ousting of Chief Curator Paul Schimmel and news that the pop-cultural slant the museum had taken under director Jeffrey Deitch will continue with an exhibition on disco music's influence on art and culture.

Baldessari is the fifth board member to resign since February - another sign that all is not well at MOCA. Last week four of the museum's life trustees called for a U-turn back to the kind of exhibitions it was famous for before the arrival of Deitch two years ago. They also disagreed with a recent column by Eli Broad, a MOCA life trustee and the museum's biggest supporter, who wrote in support of its direction under Deitch. "The celebrity-driven program...that Deitch promotes is not the answer," the letter said. Read more...
Image: John Baldessari

LA MoCA launches new online Land Art atlas

To launch their new exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, the first exhibition to explore a body of work that can only truly be experienced in person, in some of the more remote places on the planet, LA MoCA has created an online directory for the Land Art movement. The online component makes it possible for viewers to get a sense of the works and the landscape that gave them their context and power. Read more...
Image: James Turrell's Roden Crater

$1k to $50m

50 years ago LA art dealer Irving Blum, a former furniture salesman who bought a stake in Ferus gallery, persuaded Andy Warhol to mount his first solo show there. He also had the foresight to buy Campbell's Soup Cans for $1,000. The work which eventually sold for $15 million has returned to LA MOCA for a tribute exhibition to the gallery and Blum as one of its directors who also championed Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Frank Stella early in their careers.
Image: Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Marina Abramovic to direct LA MOCA gala

Following her Manchester performance The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic with actor Willem Dafoe, singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty and director Robert Wilson, Abramovic has been named to direct LA MOCA's annual gala in November. The fundraising event has become something of an art world extravaganza. Last year Doug Aitken created an immersive, multimedia project that included a set by Devendra Banhart, and in 2009 Francesco Vezzoli created a spectacle that included Lady Gaga performing on a Damien Hirst-painted piano.

Image: From The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic