Here come the predictable howls from the LA art world peanut gallery. Jeffrey Deitch has announced the first show he will oversee as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. It will be a survey of the art of Dennis Hopper curated by Julian Schnabel. Art insiders are upset that their rarified dialogue is being usurped. The kernel of truth at the core of every a priori criticism of the Hopper show is a fear of being excluded from a club that the insiders have made dull in order keep it elite. When art is popular, these snakes will have no say so at the party.
There will be pathetic arguments against this “celebrity” curation. They will be made by people who have invested their souls in keeping the art world removed from measurements like “success” and “popularity”. There are legions of these assholes in every art scene. They might constitute the majority of art world denizens. They champion the hot-air ethos of being a clever spoiled loser whose sole contribution to our existence is the ability to argue that a turd is a masterpiece and a masterpiece is a turd. The art world is attractive to these worms because they can fail in public and still rationalize their presence in the art world as “important”. The goal of Jeffrey Deitch is to boost MOCA’s visibility to the millions of people hungry for an enriched cultural life. The side effect of bold exhibitions will be to kill off these art world snakes; perhaps they will all slither off to New York or Berlin and snivel about Los Angeles and deride it as “not serious” while all of us here are having a great old time without their sneering deconstructions. No matter where they go, these snakes will still be eager to piss on anyone’s parade and call themselves superior during the tinkle, but they won’t be doing it here. Jeffrey Deitch is about to pull a Saint Patrick and drive the snakes from L.A.
I will go on record as saying this is exactly the kind of show Los Angeles, and especially MOCA, needs. Without shows that engage a larger public, this institution only has credibility with 20 rich trustees, 10 powerful academic institutions and 150 jaded trust fund alcoholics parroting the conceptualist party line. With celebrity wattage like this show, MOCA validates its role as a central part of LA.’s cultural life. If Hopper is not a deserving artist and Schnabel not a deserving curator, so what, MOCA’s track record has been to champion a clique of conceptualists and minimal-aesthetic auction house darlings with the occasional starfucker bombast exhibit thrown in for press. Yes, the absolute inconsequential garbage in MOCA’s past has not been deserving either, so why not bring celebrity into the dialogue and see what happens? Oh because it will exclude the art world snakes who want to keep the art world small and exclusive so that their egos can stay satisfied without accomplishing anything of actual importance.
I will take Hopper via Schnabel courtesy of Deitch because the ephemeral, academic diarrhea that has been exhibited at MOCA over the past decade has amounted to a failure to live up to the role this museum should be playing in Southern California. MOCA has abandoned any engagement with the public, establishing the smug implication that it knows better than museum visitors. All of this is fine if it were not for the large amount of public funds it seeks, the sweet real estate deal that landed it two choice downtown locations courtesy of the public sector and the potency to validate art and artists that its museum status carries.
MOCA almost got shut up two years ago because it has meandered through three decades hardly ever putting up.
An art history stamp collection is something of which a dead city can be proud. L.A. is living history and its Museum of Contemporary Art needs to reflect that in as ambitious a statement as possible. Even if the Hopper show is a dismissable failure, even if Hopper uses it to pump the career of his spoiled rotten talentless “art son” Henry, or Schnabel allows it to be used get back at the actor’s ex wives, it will still be the right show at the right time because the energy surrounding the show will match the scope of what MOCA can mean as an icon to the region.
Look, I’m in the art world, and there is a reflexive worry that the “no-art people” are going to come around, glom on, invade all the relationships I have cultivated, cut in line for exclusives and dumb-down the dialogue with their jackass incomprehension of anything that doesn’t spoonfeed them a plot. But I will take a little airhead action and all the ships rising over what the art scene is now: a desert with some pretty petty pompous pricks preening in pedigrees form the local diploma mills. These snakes are unable to swim, and Deitch is about to open the floodgates of popularity. Watching the clique of this town’s art elites drown will please the sadist inside every populist. I’m popping popcorn and getting a front row seat to watch entire legacies be erased in a matter of weeks – coming this fall for an extended engagement!!