Earlier in the week we learned that Jeffrey Deitch, one of the most important dealers of contemporary art today, was being hired as the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. As you can imagine, the hiring of an art dealer to the post of director of a museum has understandably stirred quite the criticism from the non profit world. One of those responses is from CultureGrrl. In her article Dealer-to-Director: Why Jeffrey Deitch is Wrong for LA MOCA she points out a number of reasons why she feels that Deitch is the wrong choice. My focus is on when she mentions “time-honored museum management practices” as she discusses how LA MOCA got into the mess they are in now.
I have a world of respect for Lee Rosenbaum (CultureGrrl) and for the work she has done with her blog. She obviously is very knowledgeable and is a leader in her field. That said, I can’t agree with her when she says that we need to keep doing things as they have been done in the past. The problems that museums have had are not only a result of a bad economy and the stock market but of poorly updated museum management models which don’t reflect current market trend and consumer practice.
At the beginning, Museums were a place of intellectual consumption by the elite which over the years slowly let the public enter. Today, Museums have a drastically different purpose, they are about community and education. Museums are meant to be for the people, a people who can just as easily spend the $20 dollars they would pay to go to MoMA at the Imax to see Avatar in 3D. It is for this reason that Museums need to learn how to stay relevant and competitive, by creating content and environments that attract today’s audience and their needs without compromising artistic expression.
My support of this appointment lies in the fact that the board of LA MOCA are clearly thinking out of the box, something that the rest of the museum world is in dire need of. With Deitch as its director, LA MOCA could very well have a new burst of energy infused in it, one that it seems it highly needs. Yes, he doesn’t have non profit experience and might not necessarily know the manner in which non profits function (although I’m sure he sits on plenty of boards himself) but I doubt very highly anyone at LA MOCA expects him to. If anything, when it comes to those issues he can have someone on his staff to guide him in the right direction.
What Deitch brings to the table is the possibility for innovation and a new vision for the museum that looks towards the future and not the past. Museums need to stay fresh, relevant and attract new audiences in order to stay afloat. For that they need the kind of thinking and connections that Deitch has, ones that will bring exciting programing (just like he is currently doing in New York) and donors that will support his initiatives and as a result the museum.
As Arts Administrators we really need to be open minded to new out of the box ideas and to a more progressive approach to museum management. As the current model doesn’t seem to be working, why not try something new?
