Dakis Fracas: Lisa Phillips and Massimiliano Gioni on Doing the Right Thing

LEFT PHOTO: Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director, at Joannou press preview. (In background, a rear view of Andro Wekua, "Wait to Wait," 2006)
RIGHT PHOTO: Massimiliano Gioni, right, director of special exhibitions, discussing the show

Guest curator Jeff Koons and featured collector Dakis Joannou were, as expected, notably absent from Tuesday's press preview for the New Museum's controversial "Skin Fruit" exhibition (although they cheerfully showed up for conversation and photo opportunities at that evening's opening festivities).

But the New Museum's director, Lisa Phillips, and director of special exhibitions, Massimiliano Gioni, were present, accessible and responsive to pesky questions at the press preview for the exhibition of museum trustee Joannou's private holding.

So I finally got an opportunity to get a complete response to my repeated questions about the organization and funding of the show.

I heard all the right answers: Phillips assured me that the selection of the show and the curator were entirely initiated by the museum, not by the collector. She declared that absolutely no funds for the show or for anything related to it (specifically: shipping, insurance, catalogue) had come from Joannou, who is a trustee of the museum. I also directly asked if Dakis had recently upped his contribution to the endowment (shades of Guggenheim/Armani) and, again, the answer was, "No."

"Doing the right things for the right reasons is key," Phillips told me. "We make our decisions based on our mission and this show speaks to our mission." The collection, she noted, includes artists who are "unknown, to mid-career, to senior figures. That's what we do."

She stated that the museum had received firm assurances from the collector/trustee that the works on display would not be sold and added that this collector sells very rarely (although here's one highly publicized recent occasion where he did and here's another work, by Koons, that had once been in Joannou's collection and was sold at Sotheby's in 2007).

All well and good. But these answers should have been forthcoming in mid-October, the first of several times when I contacted the press office, in vain, for clarification about these arrangements. The fact that my repeated queries were ignored, as well as Phillips' noticeable hesitation before answering "no" to my question about whether Joannou had helped fund the exhibition's catalogue, made me wonder why the museum hadn't candidly said all the right things in the first place.

If there's one lesson that museums took away from the dust-up over the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" show of Charles Saatchi's collection, it was that complete, immediate, ungrudging transparency in such matters is the cornerstone of responsible museum stewardship.

Koons did a creditable job as curator, but giving over the entire museum to a neophyte is, to my mind, a mistake (notwithstanding his recently publicized experience in hanging "The Koons Collection"). I would have preferred this job to have gone to Gioni, who has helped organize previous shows from Joannou's collection, and whose deeply perceptive, deftly written catalogue essay is in sharp contrast to Koons' confusing musings in an interview with Phillips (also published in the catalogue).

At the press preview, Gioni described to me his friendship with Joannou this way:

He's so passionate about art and I am too, so we would speak all the time. Every week we'd talk about things we'd seen and we discussed works. I have installed his collection a couple of times in Athens---first sometimes with other people and sometimes alone. It's a friendship based on the fact that we both love art a little too much! He's been very helpful with things I've done.

Gioni wanted to emphasize that he is not currently paid by Joannou or the other collectors with whom he consults:

I work for free. Remind people that I work for free because I believe in the art and because he [Joannou] can be very generous in other ways. That's the great thing about Dakis. Many artists also feel that way. He's a really generous person, so that when you deal with him it's about play, it's not about work. I'm not on payroll with him. Many other friends and collectors I work with know that's the way I operate.

Phillips reiterated to me her museum's expressed intention to mount more shows drawn from individual private collections (a series called "The Imaginary Museum"), although none has yet been announced. I believe that the museum, in the future, should avoid privileging the holdings of yet another New Museum trustee: The perception of conflict of interest (i.e., flattering a trustee on whom the museum depends upon for support; potentially enhancing the market value of the trustee's collection) is too great.

I also believe that any artist-organized exhibitions, in the future, should be limited to dossier displays. Sweeping multi-artist projects that occupy the entire museum should be left to museum professionals---either the New Museum's own very capable curators or experienced guest curators.

In her catalogue preface, Phillips notes that the idea of "The Imaginary Museum" series grew out of discussions about whether the New Museum should form its own collection. (It owns neighboring property to house such a trove, if and when it begins acquiring works.) This succession of private-collection shows is seen as a way to test the idea of sharing or borrowing collections, rather than owning works.

In support of this, Lisa invoked the ghost of Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, who (according to Phillips, in a footnote to her preface) contemplated the possibility of developing "a collection of shared or borrowed works."

I'm not sure that it's appropriate to speculate, "What would Marcia do?" But I suspect that the organizer of the 1994 Bad Girls show would have smiled at seeing one of the works in the current show, by an artist who was her friend and who edited (and wrote the afterword for) Tucker's posthumously published biography, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World: