My email inbox is stuffed with pleas, my FaceBook account is repeating the same chorus: Save MOCA… L.A. MOCA needs us all… come to Sunday’s meeting of how to save the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Uh, no I won’t be going. I would love to see MOCA survive and thrive. But without attending, I can tell you what will happen. There will be an impressive crush of people. The size of the group will create more of a sense of disorganization than unity. Any idiots who bring signs will get the “art world ice treatment” from those who feel that they are anointed members of the art world. Those who dress audaciously to attract individual attention will get the psychic sneer from the anointed ones.
I won’t be going because once thy open the floor to speakers, there will be someone who rambles on and on about the community. And what this person will really be saying is “Put me in charge.” And then someone will bring up the lack of local artists in shows and what they will really be saying is “This museum needs to show my art.” And then someone will remind everyone that this is OUR museum. Which it is not, since we cannot see the books, cannot see how much the museum spends buying art, cannot become members of the country club without being rich and qualifying. When anyone gets up and says a bad word about the THIEVERY that has gone on at the museum with the money, that person will be castigated by other speakers as “too negative.”
I won’t be going because Sunday will be a clusterfuck. The people who teach will be upset that it is not conducted in a more collegial fashion. The fuckers who pillaged MOCA will stand there and pretend to earnestly be taking it all in when they cannot stand to be near the “common people.” The artists who speak will be shilling for themselves. A prestigious audience plant or two will suck up to MOCA powers-that-be unaware that some of these people will either be going to jail or at the every least be banished form the institutional art world forever.
I won’t be going because now is not the time for town hall meetings. Now is the time for the state attorney general to do his job. Were the powers that be at MOCA smart enough to buy art at retail prices and receive kickback money on these purchases? The private art dealers and the museum green-lighters will go to jail if this was the case. If MOCA higher-ups were NOT embezzling the money in a variety of schemes pretty much based on the above scenario, were they really just insipidly partying in the art world on the donors’ dimes? Not illegal, but stupid, career-ending and symptomatic of the narcissism that comes when you believe your own bullshit and/or buy the sucker’s sales pitch that Murakami is a good artist.