Jeffrey Deitch Faces Critics at MOCA

ZELIG is missing. It is a crisp evening and along Santa Monica Boulevard, out toward the Paramount lot, a platoon of valet parkers stands theatrically awaiting stardom or the arrival of the city’s cultural cognoscenti, whichever comes first.

The autumn arts season is under way here, and the occasion is the inaugural exhibition of the new Regen Projects gallery, a white stucco fortress so hulking and large it could easily swallow up great chunks of Chelsea. A show of work by artists both new and established has drawn out the city’s creative types along with dealers and collectors and curators, eager to see an outpost pioneered by the dealer Shaun Caley Regen in an unlikely corner of this art-absorbed city.

It is a must-attend event, and thus here is the artist Catherine Opie, in a spread-collared shirt and black trousers, proprietarily showing a posse of friends around the museum-like white cubes, while over-tanned waitresses, dressed with no irony (this is Hollywood, after all) as Kim Kardashian teeter on stilettos carrying trays of Champagne.

And here is Mark Bradford, if not the best painter working in America today then certainly the tallest, gliding past works by certified stars like Jack Pierson, Glenn Ligon, Lari Pittman, Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon, Matthew Barney and others. And here is Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with his comely wife, the brand consultant Katherine Ross. And here is Irving Blum, godfather of Los Angeles dealers, a throwback to the 1950s glory days of the Ferus Gallery, when Ed Ruscha was still an unknown working for an ad agency. And here is a flock of deep-pocketed arts patrons descended from their 40,000-square-foot houses in Beverly Park high upon Mulholland Drive. And here is a cluster of movie agents looking perhaps for things to cover the holes in their walls. And here, too, is Michael Peter Balzary, better known as Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm as he gazes at his image in a mirrored wall sculpture by Anish Kapoor.

The faceted fly’s-eye surface of the artwork refracts the faces of a crowd representative of the core Los Angeles art world — everyone who matters in the arts is here, with one conspicuous exception.

Where is Jeffrey Deitch?

For the last two years in this city, ever since he was appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles — and before that, for decades throughout the art world — Mr. Deitch was a constant and predictable art-world presence. Steely though soft-spoken, enigmatic to the point of appearing to be a cipher, dressed in trademark double-breasted bespoke suits and owlish eyeglasses made from buffalo horn, Mr. Deitch was a kind of art-world Zelig.

Like the Woody Allen character, Mr. Deitch had elements about him of the chameleon, morphing over time from a performance artist to an art critic (he was the first American editor of Flash Art) to an art adviser in possession of a Harvard M.B.A. (developing Citibank’s art advisory group) to an art dealer (in little more than a decade he built Deitch Projects into one of New York’s premier galleries). The career apotheosis of the 59-year-old Mr. Deitch occurred when he was appointed to lead a world-class museum with holdings impossible — particularly during an art-speculation bubble when a Gerhard Richter work painted in 1994 could sell for $34.2 million — to duplicate.

Then, as with Zelig, something happened to Mr. Deitch. The world in whose workings he had immersed himself abruptly seemed to have turned on him.

“I’ve been in this business for decades and I’m not in a position where somebody is going to knock down my self-confidence,” Mr. Deitch said in a September interview at the Tower Bar, a plush nexus of power dining tucked into a corner of the Sunset Tower Hotel.

“I suppose it’s characteristic of the movie industry that people are in and out,” Mr. Deitch said. “In New York I was always really appreciated for my contribution, but you would think that all I’ve done here is court Hollywood and do celebrity art.”

He was specifically referring to efforts by detractors to recast his brief tenure at a museum that, when he inherited its mantle, was virtually on life support as the story of a hubristic outlander with outsize ideas about how to repackage and sell Los Angeles to itself.

There have been missteps over the two years since Mr. Deitch moved west, specifically a handful of shows that took celebrity as their focus. Yet while there have been measurable and even outstanding successes, these have been purged from the narrative.

View the original article here