Thoughts on the LA MOCA Mess

The recent public discussions surrounding the ouster of LA MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, and the subsequent resignation of every artist member from the museum’s board of directors have inspired me to take a closer look at some of the issues underpinning this controversy. The personnel changes at LA MOCA reflect the continuing struggles of the museum to find the right balance between the need to appeal to a broad audience, and the museum’s mission to promote and exhibit cutting edge contemporary art. The Gold plated LA Culturati seems to be collectively chewing its manicured nails in nervousness at the horrific prospect that the museum could be too closely following the precedent set by the Guggenheim Museum’s 1998 exhibition, The Art of the Motorcycle, which was critically panned as a lowbrow pandering to the masses, even as it achieved unprecedented blockbuster status in terms of its public attendance, while the LA museum’s public audience is responding with an outpouring of derision and indifference at the attention being given to such a specialized crisis. The existence of such a split in perception reveals the root of a problem facing contemporary art’s place in society.

The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition was hardly the first museum show to attempt to engage a larger popular audience at the perceived expense of its place in art world sophistication. In the medium of photography, Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition generated similar criticism, as well as a similarly record breaking public attendance. The contemporary museums’ identity crisis, however seems to be predicated on a much wider gulf between the popular and the advanced notion of art than was evident in 1955. Today’s museums face even greater pressures to raise money and public support in a much more difficult economic climate, while contemporary art is arguably more distant from the understanding and participation of the public than was the relatively comprehensible art world of the 1950’s. On retrospect, 50’s advanced art was still at least rooted in generally accepted and understood principles of aesthetics and human experience, deriving its avant-garde status from a critical engagement with a much less abstruse theoretical framework than today’s offerings, despite the immediate perplexity it sometimes engendered in its public reception at the time. 1955’s advanced art revolved around the expression of one’s personal subjective journey, engaging fields such as psychology, physics, and metaphysics that were largely familiar to an educated public. Today’s public may be less aware of the layer upon layer of postmodern, post feminist, post structuralist & semiotic theory & contemporary art’s increasingly obscure historical referents that despite their utility in generating new ways of looking at cultural text and social phenomenon, appear from outside its confines as merely  post rational and post relevant, serving only to gird the contemporary art world like an armored gate against access or comprehension by a potentially interested layperson.

One could also look at the Guggenheim motorcycle show as the recognition of the aesthetic achievements of a marginalized culture through a unique vernacular art form --acknowledgement of the fact that Art with a capital A doesn't necessarily have to originate from the scions of upper crust institutions and social strata. Considering the source, as well as the way it has modeled subsequent and increasingly populist exhibitions I don't doubt that the true intention of such programming was and continues to be a calculated ploy to suck in the ticket buying masses to pay the bills. Many blockbuster museum shows have obviously followed suit with an increasingly blatant pandering to popular taste. Given the perspective of the current LA MOCA fiasco as one in a long history of this ever escalating conflict, I hope its current iteration might inspire some contemporary artists, curators and art administrators to contemplate WHY more academically oriented work often fails so miserably to engage the public.

It's easy to be cynical about the lowbrow preferences of the unwashed hoi polloi, but it shouldn't be necessary for museums to mirror popular culture in order to attract a crowd if the art shown had more of a direct connection to human experience, striving to connect and communicate, rather than exclude and obfuscate. I’ve heard today’s hipsters, the latest iteration of self proclaimed guardians of populist cutting edge taste directly state that if anyone else has heard of X, Y, or Z cultural text, then it’s automatically no longer cool. I’ll not get too hung up on the irony that this statement usually refers to a “band”, itself the product of a music that could only exist in the popular sphere by very definition, but rather reflect upon the notion that this pose itself has never been cool, and instead embodies cool’s very opposite, a thinly disguised elitism that depends upon what it excludes rather than what it expresses for the dubious value of its cachet. It seems to me, that the art world has for too long blindly tread this same unfortunate path. By no means all, but a lot of what is celebrated as advanced contemporary art has similarly lost its ability to relate to a general audience, functioning instead as a semi private joke that only speaks to a select few who have (or pretend to have) a deep understanding of successive layers of obscure art historical and theoretical reference that along with the requisite bank balance to use the art market as a playground for a game of hide and seek with the IRS, basically signifies nothing beyond membership in an exclusionary elite club. I agree with the LA MOCA artist board members’ public call for more transparency and accountability in the institution’s decision making, but I’d be infinitely more impressed if they used the enviable visibility of their platform to call for more transparency in the meanings, social relevance, means of production, and curation of art itself. Since some of the very artists (formerly) on the LA MOCA board have both contributed to, and benefited mightily from this hermetic culture that has risked cutting off advanced art from the roots of the society from which it arises, and to which it owes some semblance of relevance, I’m not holding my breath in anticipation for the appearance of any such manifesto.

On one level their response to the museum’s new direction is admirable. Any public institution owes its constituency a clear rationale for its direction and choices of leadership and programming. The collective contributions of these artists to the art world and LA MOCA alike are also undeniable, but from another perspective, the walkout could look a lot like the predictable fit of pique displayed by members of any elite club when certain “undesirable elements” clamor for admittance. That this drama is playing on Main Street to a very different response from the hand wringing and consternation of art world insiders is readily visible if those involved would temporarily remove their noses from expensive art journals, and check out the public comments sections on the daily newspaper accounts of this latest tempest in high culture’s fur lined teacup.

Big, publically funded art institutions simply can't expect to sustain an exclusionary world of advanced practice and theory, while still engaging enough of an audience to support and finance them. I'm not arguing for the dumbing down of art, or for an art world that must depend solely on a brutal pure capitalist calculation, but conservative politicians and an alienated pubic alike will see to it that this is the final outcome unless the art world itself recognizes that it should function in the service of society, not as a separate society on some strata far above the reach of the commoner. Beyond indulging in a self serving jargon laden internal dialog, incomprehensible to even the well educated layman, surely there is an interpretive and educational role for those holding the keys to the specialized knowledge, history and practice of advanced art. I’m suggesting that in order for this field to remain socially relevant, and thus supported, it must look beyond the limited dialectic between populism and elitism, embracing its responsibility to educate the public in ways that encourage participation and inclusion, finding a middle ground that retains its roots in relatable sources of cultural and personal origins. Only then will the new ideas that it generates advance the perceptions, self understanding, and thinking of society as a whole, earning it the right to an audience by its ultimate usefulness as a critique and reflection of contemporary concerns, rather than as a spiritually and conceptually bereft commodity market that’s outlived its social contract.