Posts Tagged ‘board’
MOCA Leadership & Their Museums
Jeffrey Deitch will bid adieu to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Best Coast and head back to New York, where his genius is appreciated and where he is already curating a show. Poor Deitch, un-hip, philistine LA just didn’t get him. The biggest Deitch defender in the press has been Art in the Streets associate curator (non-MOCA curator) Aaron Rose: “We had something going in L.A., and it’s over now. Jeffrey’s resigning is really a statement about what the city is. All people in L.A. want is interior design. They want paintings to put over the couch.” Let’s leave generalizations about “people in L.A.” out of this Aaron Rose, and take a moment to remember that time New York Times Magazine did a spread on “Jeffrey’s Deitch’s Party House.” Let’s talk about that interior design Aaron Rose: Deitch may not have paintings over his couch, but he does have painted couches.
Chapter 2 (Part 2): The Race for The Broad – A Tale of Three Cities
“I think what Santa Monica has to offer is an incredible audience, a prime location and willingness to work with the Broads.”[i] – Kevin McKeown, Santa Monica City Councilman
Within just a few months of BCAM’s opening at LACMA, rumors began to circulate that Eli Broad had been less than forthcoming about his true intentions. Contrary to his initial denial of it, at the end of 2008 local newspapers began reporting Broad intended to build a new museum for his collections in Beverly Hills.[ii] The City of Beverly Hills quickly identified a prominent parcel of land at the intersections of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards for the project. An architectural competition was announced, a short list determined (Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Rafael Viñoly and Christian Portzamparc), and schematic renderings of the site plan were even published. [iii] If this speedy development seemed too good to be true, it’s because it was.
By the end of 2009, Broad announced that there were actually multiple cities vying for his collections and a new museum building to house them. Beverly Hills, previously unchallenged was suddenly competing with the City of Santa Monica, and Broad’s foundation announced there was also a third, unnamed city in the running.[iv] This of course turned out to be the City of Los Angeles. Broad said he wasn’t, “trying to play the two [three] municipalities against each other […] he hope[d] that by talking to several different cities he c[ould] accelerate the process of building.”[v] But play them against each other he did, for six months, trying to secure the best deal.
Chapter 1 (Part 1): One Eli Broad Too Many, Or Not Enough?
“Eli is not the problem. The problem is that we don’t have enough Elis in Los Angeles to balance out his generosity and the power of his influence.”[i] – Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum
Photographs of Los Angeles from fifty years ago capture an unfamiliar city. In the 1960s, downtown’s Bunker Hill was still occupied by a row of quiet Victorian houses. Since then, the Victorians have been cleared away and the city has experienced a population boom often illustrated as a mushroom cloud-shaped diagram, and now boasts a population of 9.86 million.[ii] While established in many ways, Los Angeles’s philanthropic culture is still in its infancy. Despite ranking the second most populous city in America, the quantity of powerful philanthropists is insignificant at best. Those who are active give to educational, environmental, health, and political causes.
Leadership
The Getty
There have been a lot of announcements from on high lately. The critics have begun to weigh-in on the recent appointment of Timothy Potts as the new director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty also disclosed a list of its highest paid personnel. Here’s an infographic to help make things easier.