Soap Opera ââågeneral Hospitalã¢ââ Into an Exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum Role Fits a Former Fine art Dealer
LOS ANGELES
"HERE we go, folks. Page 133. And — activity!"
Midnight had come and gone in a huge, light-flooded plaza nigh the West Hollywood co-operative of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a place that on this crisp June night was filled, quite surreally, with open-air sets for "General Hospital."
In the middle of 1 prepare Jeffrey Deitch, a small, trim man in a double-breasted navy arrange with a little makeup dabbed on his cheeks and forehead, stood encircled by television set cameras, preparing to play a graphic symbol called "Jeffrey Deitch, director of MOCA" — a function he had but taken on in real life also after a decades-long career as a high-profile New York fine art dealer.
The sprawling lather-at-the-museum functioning was Mr. Deitch's idea, the offset public art result he had overseen since taking the helm at the Museum of Contemporary Fine art three weeks earlier. Information technology involved filming a serial of scenes set there, starring Mr. Deitch's friend James Franco, the actor and budding artist who strangely took a function on "General Infirmary" terminal yr in what he has described equally a guerilla performance-fine art piece. The new scenes are his return to the evidence and renew his efforts to smuggle a little conceptual-fine art contraband into center-American living rooms (where, if he does his chore correct, the art aspect might go unnoticed).
That the museum had become a soap opera set was pure Deitch, for ameliorate or worse: stuntlike, crazily experimental, scrambling loftier and low culture, risking ridicule and seeming not to care much when it rains down on his caput.
And the shoot was a perfect keepsake of the bug and anxieties raised past the choice of Mr. Deitch last January equally the establishment was emerging from deep financial turmoil and surprised the art world by picking a gallery owner to bring together the museum leadership ranks, which mostly elevate from inside.
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No mega-dealer like Mr. Deitch, 57, had ever made the transition to running a nonprofit museum, and his selection has been parsed endlessly for what it says about the boundary betwixt museums and art selling, a once-brilliant line that is becoming increasingly difficult to meet. (In the 1950s James J. Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, warned a young Thomas Hoving, who would afterwards succeed him, "If you lot go an fine art dealer, you'll never exist able to work in a museum.")
Mr. Deitch agreed to close his gallery, Deitch Projects, and cease all commercial activity before taking the task, a switch that will hateful a considerable loss of income for him. But his choice notwithstanding ready off alarm bells nigh possibilities for conflicts of interest and cronyism. He made headlines well-nigh immediately by proverb that he would not rule out the possibility of selling works from his own huge personal fine art collection or his erstwhile gallery's inventory during his directorship, in order to meet financial obligations in New York, where he still owns two buildings in SoHo and rents art-storage warehouses. He has also dismissed as childish the notion that he pledge not to prove artists whom he promoted and befriended at his gallery.
So the "General Hospital" consequence was as much a political statement as it was a performance piece. Mr. Franco had originally approached Mr. Deitch with the idea of staging the soap in New York at his gallery. When it became articulate the gallery would be closing, Mr. Deitch simply proposed doing information technology at the museum instead (where an exhibition based on the project will be mounted this year). Like many of his projects through the years, this i would not have had much profit-making potential in a gallery. But Mr. Deitch knew that the very idea of shuttling a prove so readily between his two worlds would not sit down well with some people, including a few of his new employees.
"There are, naturally, people on the staff who are not comfortable with what I'thousand doing," he said, driving downward Melrose Avenue to his soap-opera star plough.
Fifty-fifty before officially taking the job, he began looking for means to concenter new audiences and back up for a museum nonetheless trying to correct its finances. He conceived and fast-tracked a retrospective on the work of Dennis Hopper, who died on May 29, organized by Mr. Deitch's friend Julian Schnabel and opening side by side Sunday. He canceled a show that curators were already working on simply that he believed to be redundant. And he is working to put together a major exhibition nigh the influence of street art, a movement that was cardinal to the identity of Deitch Projects in recent years.
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"I retrieve it's kind of unprecedented," he said of his flurry of plans. "I've hit the ground running. And there's no fourth dimension to lose hither. We've got to make an bear on."
During more than three months afterwards his pick past the museum, Mr. Deitch allowed a reporter to tag along and observe, at to the lowest degree to an extent, as he prepared to assume the new office and wound down his 14-year-old gallery, a procedure that involved consolidating art-storage warehouses (vi at one signal), finding new spaces for artists working in studios he had rented, and dealing with complex real-manor litigation. (His gallery building on Grand Street in SoHo was destabilized subsequently its next-door neighbour began sagging.)
The transition was made much more than complicated past the kind of gallery Mr. Deitch ran. It had moneymakers on its roster but also a couple of garage bands' worth of young artists whom Mr. Deitch supported, more as patron than dealer, with the considerable money he made brokering huge sales in the secondary market — a skill aided by his Harvard M.B.A.
"There are millions in advances that I've given to artists over the years," he said, in exchange for promises that they would repay him if they became successful. It is a attestation to the loyalty he fostered that, even at present, virtually none of the artists he represented have announced publicly that they are joining other galleries, though some volition finish upwards with the gallery's former managing manager, Suzanne Geiss, who will exist a private dealer and manager, and with two other former directors, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman, who have opened a SoHo gallery chosen the Hole with Mr. Deitch's approving and the help of his connections.
While some gallery owners might exist able to hand the keys to a trusted lieutenant upon leaving, Mr. Deitch's departure removes the center of gravity for a group he had put into orbit around him, in a slightly nostalgic attempt to recreate in microcosm the more freewheeling art world of the 1970s and 1980s in which he came of historic period. (He opened his first gallery as a college student in 1972 in a rented hotel parlor in Lenox, Mass., and sold out the beginning week. Later he talked his way into his first official art-world chore, as a receptionist at the prestigious John Weber Gallery in SoHo, by offering to work complimentary.)
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Only a few weeks earlier Mr. Deitch'due south move to Los Angeles he presided over the last opening at Deitch Projects, for a bear witness by the celebrity street creative person Shepard Fairey, an event that drew then many people it closed down a block of Wooster Street. Besides a few "This Is Your Life" figures from Mr. Deitch's New York career — Fab v Freddy, Debbie Harry, the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones — the oversupply was composed generally of people non often seen in New York fine art galleries. A motorbike gang member in a leather jacket approached Mr. Deitch and shook his hand, saying, "Thank y'all for your years of service."
Standing subsequently on the edge of his loft role high to a higher place the scrum, in a pale reddish seersucker suit that lent him the air of a song-and-trip the light fantastic man, Mr. Deitch said: "People go along asking, 'Why does this human being in his 50s want to be surrounded by all these kids?' But I was just a kid myself when I started in the art world. This has e'er been my kind of crowd."
The adjacent night he was feted past his staff and friends at a dinner at a sweltering loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that he had rented for Ms. Geiss. Mr. Deitch sat side by side to his pal Jeff Koons and submitted with a bemused, fastidious smile to the dark's entertainment, the earthy chanteuse Bridget Everett, who mussed his hair and came close to sitting in his lap as she serenaded him. Her vocal echoed the sentiment many of his New York friends had been expressing, more or less: "We've got tonight, infant. Why don't you stay?"
Late last year, Mr. Deitch said, when he began considering whether to stay or to accept the museum's offer, the conclusion was not merely about whether he wanted to run the institution. In 2008 he had opened a new, hangar-sized co-operative of his gallery in a former soda warehouse on the water in Long Island City, Queens, and proceeded to turn information technology into something that was almost a museum in itself, one dominated by performances and other generally unsaleable art, similar a final evidence of paintings by Josh Smith done directly on the walls and primered over at the end.
"In terms of endmost things downwards, this is what I experience the sorriest about," Mr. Deitch said one morning every bit he walked around the space, which will be taken over by the Gladstone Gallery, mostly for art storage. "In the end the debate for me came down to whether to go to a public museum or to liquidate some of my assets and create a museum of my own, maybe here." He said he chose the old considering working for an established public establishment would make information technology possible to collaborate with more than artists, and considering he sees Los Angeles every bit a paradise for museum experimentation — the kind of urban center that would hire Jeffrey Deitch to run a museum.
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Maria Bong, a co-chairwoman of the museum's board, said it was not a decision fabricated without some misgivings. "A lot of thought was given to it," she said, "and I will say that there were times when people took break and wondered whether we could practise this." Just the board was enticed by Mr. Deitch'due south populist philosophy and his confidence that contemporary museums sometimes needed to act first and inquire questions subsequently. "Why non exist nimble enough to add programming that tin can be done in a shorter time, to be tapping into the contemporary art world as it'southward happening?" she said.
As for concerns virtually conflicts of interest if Mr. Deitch has to sell works from his own collection, Ms. Bell said the lath spent "untold amounts of fourth dimension discussing it." Simply in the end she said she considered it an "external problem" of perceptions, not an internal one that the museum had many concerns about, calling Mr. Deitch a man of "unbelievable personal integrity" who had made huge fiscal sacrifices to come to the public sector. (The museum has not disclosed Mr. Deitch's salary and benefits; his predecessor received near half a million dollars a year.)
"We think he'll actually build our constituency and bring more than people to the museum in new and exciting ways," she said.
In the meantime he has given up his New York apartment on the Upper Eastward Side, a studio rental that became famous in the art earth considering it was so tiny, spartan and completely devoid of fine art. He now lives in a rambling Spanish revival house, also rented, that once belonged to Cary Grant in the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood here, with a kidney-shaped pool. From his balcony he can come across the Hollywood sign to the north and, to the due south, the tennis courts of his new neighbors, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. ("I wanted the whole Hollywood fantasy," he said, taking in the view on a picture-perfect Angeleno afternoon.) He might even hang some of his ain art collection on the walls.
Old New York habits dice hard, however, and Mr. Deitch initially planned to get by in Los Angeles without a car, cobbling together cab and subway rides. He gave up, of course, and now drives a rented grey Lexus, in which he looks very much the office of the important museum director he was asked to play on "General Infirmary."
The soap opera gave him only a couple of lines to speak that night, merely Mr. Deitch nailed them with a trace of Method-acting naturalism, and as the cameras pulled dorsum the director on the set gave the new extra from out East a thumbs upward.
"Love it!" he yelled. "That's a move on."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/arts/design/04deitch.html
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