10 Unexpected Reactions to Jeffrey Deitch Leaving MOCA

Last month, the director of MOCA, Jeffrey Deitch, decided to step down from his position at the museum. Critics on both coasts claimed that this was a surprise to no one. His three years at MOCA were filled with controversy, and in the end, most agreed that he just wasn't the right person for the job. A businessman more than a curator, who came from a gallery instead of museum, Deitch just didn't have the chops to make it as the director at MOCA. Deitch lovers and haters alike voiced opinions about the director's departure. From James Franco to John Baldessari, here's 10 Unexpected Reactions to Jeffrey Deitch Leaving MOCA. We hope he fairs better back in New York.

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Six days after MOCA made Deitch's departure official, James Franco posted an image of himself talking to the doomed director with the caption "LA doesn't deserve jeffrey Deitch" on Instagram and Twitter. With over 15,500 likes, Franco does not stand alone in anger (or, as Hyperallergic deftly points out, "maybe they just think Franco looks cute in the pic.").

Incidentally, the show Franco curated with Deitch last May, "Rebel"—from the film Rebel Without a Cause—was a deadly stab in many Deitch attacks. The fated friendship goes back even further. 2010, Franco was the star in Deitch's show, "SOAP at MOCA." At the time, Franco was acting the part of an artist on the soap opera General Hospital, and Deitch welcomed the production into MOCA's Pacific Design Center to film an episode. Afterwards, Franco screened a movie about exhibition/performance/bad TV episode in the museum proper. Stunts like this did nothing to help Deitch's reputation.

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Out of nowhere, or so it seemed, Deitch found an unlikely banner man in Bob Dylan's son, Jesse Dylan. In a blog post for The Huffington Post, Jesse unveiled a short film interview with the director, defending Deitch as a boundary-pusher who "brought an original voice to the art scene in Los Angeles." The film traces Deitch's personal relationship with art, from his confrontation with a Fernand Léger lithograph to his arrival on the explosive LA art scene to the controversy surrounding his term at MOCA. Deitch's passion for art (if not utopian view) reminded us what he was doing at MOCA in the first place.

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MOCA was supposed to stage the kick-off for Koons' larger-than-life retrospective in 2014. Then Deitch's departure was made public, and the Koons bandwagon decided to skip over MOCA earlier this month, instead opening the retrospective at the Whitney in June 2013 (NYC-2, LA-0). The exhibition has been pushed back until 2015. Although the two events are not explicitly tied—according to Bloomberg, Whitney spokesperson Stephen Soba couldn't say if the exhibition was postponed because of the Deitch news—we can't help but think that something fishy is up with the whole departure/postponing thing. Not to mention Deitch and Koons are BFFs, and they even sound like each other.

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Is Deitch friend-cheating on Koons with Damien Hirst? It seems like the fact that the Hirst retrospective—his first one ever—will not be coming to MOCA from the Tate Modern as planned is evidence enough. Even though the Hirst show was cancelled a year before Deitch was brainstorming his farewell speech, it may have contributed to the director's departure. The museum couldn't afford to put on the show, an exhibition that blasted attendance records in London and could've brought in cash money for MOCA, as it would drain the LA museum's entire $3 million yearly budget, and some. And whose shoulders did that fall on, do you think?

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In his most Saltz-ian way in an essay New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz writes that Deitch's arrival at MOCA was doomed from the start—"a marriage made in hell"—not just because he was a curator instead of museum crony, but because he is so damn "weird." Deitch is a business man at heart, claims Saltz, and his stunts included the "Rebel" show with Franco (weird), a gala with Marina Abramovic with naked people (weird), shows on Warhol and street art (surprisingly not that weird), ending with a proposed show on Disco (was he even trying at this point?). Saltz concludes his piece, "I now know he was the wrong dealer in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong autocrat overlord," but not without showing his love for the weirdo.

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Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight calls it like it is: without museum experience, Deitch was totally unprepared to be the director at MOCA, so the museum's choice was just plain " naive." Deitch's commitment to pop culture, his money making agenda, and the fact that he was a gallery owner, not a museum person, made his appointment an "oil-and-water mix." Knight even brings down Deitch's one saving face, his "Art in the Streets" exhibition: "Making no discernible distinction between graffiti, the outlaw tagging that first flourished in 1970s New York, and considered street art in the form of epic murals and other works that prospered simultaneously in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the exhibition seemed provincial and ill-informed." Really, it just seems like Deitch didn't know what he was getting into.

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A year ago, Ruscha was the last artist standing during a mass walk-out on MOCA's board. Then Ruscha resigned, affirming what everyone already realized—that Deitch's term as director was going to shit. This month, Ruscha committed to three years on the board at SFMOMA, essentially giving SoCal the middle finger. According to the Los Angeles Times, Ruscha decided to sign on with SFMOMA (which is undergoing a huge renovation) because the museum "doesn't appear to be in any bad straits. They seem completely flush.... If they were treading water or in any sort of trouble, I wouldn't know what I could add to the picture." A nice change from his time at MOCA, at least.

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Yesterday Brad Pitt's secret ambitions to join the MOCA board allegedly came to light. An unnamed source, however, told ShowbizSpy that Pitt was too "dumb" to being on a museum's board, thwarting the actor's dreams (maybe). While we can only imagine whom this unnamed Pitt-hater is, we have yet to hear it from Brad's beautiful lips.

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"He was going to do whatever he wanted. He would add things, cancel things, change exhibition schedules, would hold parties that would end up being only break-even. He had no concept or need for those kind of events to help the museum financially," an unnamed former official at MOCA told the New York Times after the museum's Deitch announcement. According to this guy, not only was Deitch an incompetent director, but he was like a teenager that throws a party when his parents go away and thinks, "NOW I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT!"

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We expected Baldessari to look pretty smug when Deitch announced that he would be leaving MOCA—the artist did leave the board himself under the director's rule. Instead, Baldessari blamed the Great Departure on the board of trustees. "Jeffrey wasn't disingenuous. He did what he does, and that's what the museum wanted," he told the New York Times. "But I think the real problem is the museum board. It's a really nonfunctional board. They need to have a clear vision for this museum as an important place and a place where people feel the need to go, and I think right now it's a troubled and a flawed vision." Here's to looking at the bigger picture.

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