Deitch Speaks! His Guggenheim Talk on Art, Pop Culture, MOCA and Gaga

Jeffrey Deitch onstage at the Guggenheim Museum

In March, I mentioned that I had attended a public talk at the Guggenheim Museum by Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA's director-designate, after which I chatted with him and learned of his plans to continue selling art from his gallery's inventory, even after he assumes the directorship of the museum on June 1.

What I haven't yet reported is what he had to say publicly that evening about his West Coast future, which he discussed at some length.

Here are some excerpts from those remarks:

On why Jeffrey Deitch wants to direct LA MOCA:

The way people experience art, the way art is judged, is very different because of the power of the art market. You all know that I've become part of the museum world. Part of the reason I'm interested in doing that is I'm interested in being part of this correction that I think is necessary. During the past decade the impact of the auction house and the price ranking of artists in the auctions and the excitement that people felt at the art fairs and the tremendous professionalism of the big New York galleries outshown any of the museums. The kind of leadership that the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art had in an earlier era was eclipsed by the power of the market.

I sense there is a lot of fatigue about that and people are hungry for a more reasoned sense of judgment---a more historically aware set of judgments. So I'm very excited about trying to put forward a case for artists and themes in art through curatorial excellence and excitement, rather than through promotion, ads in Artforum, parties, and making a big splash at an art fair, which I've done for the past 15 years.

On two shows he curated for Dakis Joannou's Deste Foundation---"Artificial Nature" and "Post Human":

To me, those two shows did actually predict a lot of what's going on in society. When I did "Post Human"---that was 1992---talking about gym culture and plastic surgery was something quite fresh and I was one of the first to discuss this in the dialogue of art. Now, of course, you have TV shows like "Nip/Tuck" and covers of People magazine that show people before and after plastic surgery. It's totally central to pop culture. So it's very interesting to see that one can, in the art sector, be ahead of what's going on in the popular culture, and even, in a subversive way, contribute to pop culture.

On how he might have influenced Lady Gaga:

The Museum of Contemporary Art, last November, famously built a performance around Lady Gaga [who has since performed at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute gala]. Lady Gaga fascinates me because she embodies so many of the stylistic innovations and attitudes that we were working with in our shows with Fischerspooner and Kembra Pfahler and others in our gallery. She [Gaga aka Stefani Germanotta] was a student at the Tisch School at NYU when we were presenting all these projects, and I wonder if she was in the audience, absorbing this all, and then understood brilliantly how to insert this into mainstream popular culture.

On why Los Angeles interests him:

Because of this unique situation we have now of unprecedented dialogue between progressive culture and mainstream culture---there's almost been a collapse between the two---a public museum is a very interesting place to be, and particularly in Los Angeles, because Los Angeles does not have the same professional art audience that New York does. They have a crossover audience---people who work in art direction, film, music---where they don't differentiate between innovations in the digital culture and music culture and film culture. So it's going to be a very interesting opportunity to present programming that addresses this larger audience that's interested in art as a participant in the wider culture. The challenge is to engage with this new audience in a wider culture, at the same time not diluting the obligation of the museum to interpret art history in a very serious way.

On his directing style:

I'm of the opinion that I should express my own personality and vision as director of the museum, to give the museum a more personal point of view, rather than just being neutral, open to everything. I'm going to try going for an more old-fashioned approach, when museums weren't so much large, complex public institutions and where public funding gave one director the opportunity to really shape a program. Of course we do have a very diverse audience to serve---the people of Los Angeles, who speak many different languages and come from different cultures. That's very exciting to address. But I do hope to assert a personal point of view over the program.

That he has already started to do.