For a few days there was the rare appearance of calm at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. After months of searching for an executive director to share duties with artistic director Klaus Biesenbach, the museum announced earlier this month that it had poached Johanna Burton from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The two would share responsibilities in a carefully calibrated leadership structure. After months of turmoil, with staff resignations, a revenue drop, layoffs of 97 part-time employees, and furloughs of more than 30 full-time employees, MOCA seemed to finally have a road map to the future.
“I don’t think it is one job,” Maria Seferian, the former lawyer who now serves as chair of the board at MOCA, told The New York Times upon Burton’s appointment. “I think this is the right model for us right now. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked 20 years ago and it won’t work 20 years from now, but it’s the right moment for us now.”
“I personally could not have asked for a more gifted and inspiring person to lead MOCA with!” Biesenbach wrote on Instagram.
But despite the heartfelt caption, Biesenbach won’t be running MOCA with anyone. Last Friday, just seven days after the museum made Burton’s appointment public, Biesenbach revealed that he’d be leaving—jetting nearly 6,000 miles away to Berlin to become the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, along with its future Museum of the 20th Century. He informed the board just days after the duo format was hailed as the only way to move MOCA forward. (MOCA confirmed that Biesenbach informed the board and staff of his departure on September 10, the same day that a story on the appointment in the Art Newspaper was published at 3:09 p.m. London time, or 7:09 a.m. in Los Angeles.) In a way, it was all business as usual at MOCA, one of the country’s most respected contemporary arts institutions—and a hotbed of bad press for years.
“The MOCA board is united in support of Johanna,” Seferian said in a statement for this story. “She is a star with smarts. Her leadership and curatorial chops will propel MOCA forward in an impactful and inclusive manner.”
“I dont think it’s a surprise to anyone that MOCA is a chop shop of directors,” said Alex Logsdail, the director of Lisson Gallery, which represents Garrett Bradley, the artist and filmmaker who’s still slated to have her retrospective move to MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary outpost in September 2022. “No one lasts there more than a couple years, so something else is wrong with the museum. It’s not that these people are all bad at their jobs. The common denominator is MOCA.”
According to sources, that common denominator is specifically MOCA’s board, which has long demanded more control of the museum than at many institutions—former curators have departed amid squabbles with the board, and one publicly complained about being forced to make programming reflect what’s on the walls of the homes of MOCA’s patrons. (MOCA said this characterization of the board was inaccurate.) It also doesn’t help that a couple of donors opened their own L.A. museums. The Broad, founded by the late MOCA life trustee Eli Broad had an attendance of 917,489 in 2019, vastly eclipsing MOCA’s final tally that year of 357,747.
Biesenbach’s tenure as artistic director was beset with criticism from its 2018 start when it was announced that a white European male would replace another white European male, Philippe Vergne. But to get a sense of the long history of controversy at MOCA, it’s instructive to go back to the shock appointment of Jeffrey Deitch as the museum’s director in 2010. Deitch’s brash MOCA remake played to the crowd—Julian Schnabel curates a Dennis Hopper revue! Let’s do a whole show about disco with LCD Soundsystem! More James Franco performance art!—and caused a collective freak-out among the Angeleno intelligentsia. Artists Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, and Barbara Kruger all resigned from the board. Deitch, exhausted, raised the white flag in 2013. MOCA said Ruscha, Kruger, and Opie returned in 2013 to help the search for Deitch’s replacement. Kruger is currently one of the museum’s four artist trustees.
That replacement was Vergne, the serious-minded director at the Dia Art Foundation. But controversy followed as well, this time in the guise of his chief curator Helen Molesworth, who chafed against the way in which the collecting habits of the board seemed to dictate who got shows at her museum. In 2017, while onstage in San Francisco for an interview series sponsored by Artadia, Molesworth was asked about the difficulties she faced in her job. She reportedly went into an ironic voice and said, “I am never under pressure to support the work of extremely affluent white male artists who are collected by the affluent white male people who run the museum. I wish I had that struggle, because then I could really test myself against what that might feel like.” Vergne fired her in March 2018, citing “creative differences,” initiating more headlines and pushback from then board member Opie. The museum and Vergne decided not to renew his contract.
Enter Biesenbach. From the vantage point of 2019, Klaus and MOCA seemed like a perfect fit. Long a celebrity hound, his parties at his beyond minimalist Grand Street apartment would draw Courtney Love, Lady Gaga, Franco, and many others. He was also an avid Instagrammer who would often livestream his exploits to his nearly 300,000 followers. When visitors encountered him at Frieze Los Angeles in February 2020, he looked tanned and rested. As he worked the aisles like a Hollywood power broker, it was as if the City of Angels had shaved a decade off his life.
Then came the pandemic and California’s comparatively harsh lockdown protocols, which forced the museum to close from March 2020 until June 2021. (By comparison, in New York the Met reopened in August 2020.) The policies led MOCA to cut about a quarter of its budget, from about $22 million to about $16 million, and lay off 97 part-time staff members. As the museum planned to reopen in 2021, curator Mia Locks quit, writing in an exit email to staff, according to the Los Angeles Times, that “MOCA’s leadership is not yet ready to fully embrace IDEA”—IDEA being an acronym for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. Human resources director Carlos Viramontes quit in February, citing the “hostile environment,” according to the Times. (MOCA said its budget has now returned to pre-COVID levels and that “nearly all laid-off part-time staff” have been offered the opportunity to return.)
Soon after, Biesenbach was given what several L.A. art-world insiders deemed a “demotion”—he would have to share the role at the top. After months of searching, they finally found a suitable candidate, and even then the P.R. rollout became a flashpoint. A spokesperson reached out to Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight offering him the exclusive, but only if he announced the new hire without any “speculation” about the process, and barring the writer from reaching out to any MOCA staff or board members until an embargo had been lifted. Knight promptly wrote a scorching story—not about the hire, but the demands of the museum’s embargo proposal. The piece went viral, perhaps overshadowing the announcement itself.
“The embargo insanity was such an extraordinary overreach in attempting to control the narrative. Red flag, meet bull,” Knight told me in an email. “I knew my column would get art-world attention, but sizable audience interest that came from two other constituencies surprised me: other journalists and communications pros—which suggests that the problem plagues plenty of other fields.”
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Fitz & Co., the museum’s P.R. firm, said, “On behalf of MOCA, we developed a thoughtful rollout plan announcing the new director that prioritized initial communications to MOCA staff. In order to protect MOCA’s valued team from hearing the news of the new director from external sources, including press, we requested that a handful of press whom we looped in early refrain from ringing around, potentially causing an inadvertent leak.”
Biesenbach’s departure saw a much lighter communications tack from the museum. “We wish him the best and thank him for his contributions to MOCA,” it said at the time. While one could expect L.A.’s museum-going class to be rankled by the Berlin native’s flip-flop, one director at a major gallery in Los Angeles wasn’t so sure the city would feel the loss. Biesenbach, the source said, never really enmeshed himself in the L.A. art community and gallery circuit, an essential part of the job of museum director in a town with an art scene that’s much more insular than the global-minded London or New York.
Others observed that it very well could be a coincidence of timing and the vagaries of German politics. National elections in the country are weeks away, and the Christian Democratic candidate is lagging in the polls, threatening to bring down the party with him. That could doom the Angela Merkel–appointed cultural commissioner Monika Grütters—if the Social Democrats win the election, they would presumably install a member of their own party in the position, throwing the future of the twinned museums into peril. Locking in Biesenbach ahead of the potential political sea change was the safe move, even if it came at the worst possible moment for his now former employer. “The timing is not great,” Biesenbach admitted to The Times. MOCA said it had no plans to adjust, move, or cancel any of its Biesenbach-planned programming, including Sun & Sea, and a string of solo shows next year including Judith Baca, Tala Madani, and Henry Taylor in addition to Bradley.
All of this leaves MOCA with just one director, Burton, who left Ohio State University’s Wexner Center (named after Les Wexner, the L Brands founder who was Jeffrey Epstein’s only known public client for decades) after just over two years on the job. Burton grew up near Reno, and spent most of the last 25 years at various East Coast institutions both academic (Princeton, Bard) and artistic (the Whitney, the New Museum) before going to the Midwest, and now the West. One source on the Los Angeles art scene declined to comment simply because they didn’t have anything to say; “I’ve never heard of her,” one prominent gallery owner in Los Angeles told me. Others expressed cautious optimism that, despite never having lived in L.A. Burton can ingratiate herself into its closed-circuit loop. The gallery director who wished to remain anonymous said that Biesenbach only came to their premises a few times in his tenure. By comparison Michael Govan, LACMA’s director, has thrived because he’s become a legitimate part of the scene, despite also arriving as an outsider who worked at East Coast institutions. Burton, the director said, has to follow the Govan model in order to be successful. (This, it should be noted, has been a common refrain. “Maybe Klaus can do for MOCA what Michael Govan did for LACMA,” MOCA board member Nicolas Berggruen suggested to The New York Times in 2018 upon that hiring.)
But Logsdail said he’s looking forward to working with Burton and the team she hires in the run-up to Bradley’s show.
“MOCA has a habit of hiring star people as directors—it goes with the whole Hollywood thing,” Logsdail said. “But maybe it’s good to have a fresh start.”
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…To celebrate the Whitney’s big Jasper Johns retrospective, Leonard Lauder bought for the museum one of the great clapbacks in art history, Painted Bronze (1960). Johns cast the two cans of Ballantine ale in their titular metal after Willem de Kooning offered a legendary swipe to Johns’s dealer, Leo Castelli: “That son of a bitch, give him two beer cans and he could sell them.” Castelli did sell one, and Rudolf Zwirner eventually acquired it for the Cologne chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig. The artist’s proof remained with Johns, though since the 1970s it had been on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—which is presenting the other half of the Johns show, opening later this month.
…Speaking of: New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz took to Twitter this week to blast Deborah Solomon’s blockbuster New York Times story about the divergence of the curators of the two Johns shows. “I loathe the jazzy ‘story’ this article flouts,” Saltz wrote. But it turns out he had privately praised Solomon via email: “You did something gentle, that others do so ham-fisted, insistent, and annoying…. You are the only one that does this.” Times art editor Barbara Graustark tweeted an image of the exchange Monday in response to Saltz’s salty tweet, before later deleting it. (On Friday, Saltz wrote to True Colors: “I love Deborah Solomon’s piece on Jasper Johns ‘Slice.’ I wrote her a note that day to say how much it touched me. I do not like the other piece about some fabricated idea that the Whitney Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art are in competition and at war with one another over the Johns retrospective. I believe that is a false narrative.”)
…The Instagram censors cruelly disabled Regret Counter, the deliciously debauched account where users could anonymously submit the litany of substances consumed on their nights out. The account’s founder, Gladstone Gallery director Alissa Bennett, vows to compile the best submissions into a can’t-miss zine.
…Plenty of artists popped up at the flashiest of shows during New York Fashion Week. Aria Dean walked the Eckhaus Latta runway, while Chloe Wise attended the Thom Browne show, where models rode in on oversized penny-farthings, a spectacle perfectly suited for The Shed. At Rachel Comey, unofficial uniform provider of art dealers in fair booths everywhere, the show was less catwalk and more amorphous dance, featuring as models the artist Helga Davis and actor Waris Ahluwalia.
…Gagosian will be opening its third space in Paris, this one a stone’s throw from the Ritz and the Place Vendôme.
…Among those who checked out Alvaro Barrington’s new show at Nicola Vassell were artists Nari Ward and Kehinde Wiley, Harvard professor Sarah Lewis, and director Ava DuVernay.
…Swizz Beatz celebrated his birthday at Casa Cipriani on the night of the Met gala, and managed to hold his own on New York’s evening of a thousand parties. His wife, Alicia Keys, sat at the piano for a half-hour set at Jazz Bar. Elsewhere, various tipsters spotted Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Serena and Venus Williams, Joe and Helly Nahmad, new couple Channing Tatum and Zoë Kravitz getting handsy, Regina King, Lupita Nyong’o, and likely incoming New York City mayor Eric Adams, who sat with Joe and Michael Cayre—their firm, Midtown Equities, helped finance the redevelopment of the building in which the scene unfolded.
…Alex Israel is teaming with Snapchat for a show at the Bass museum in Miami during the Art Basel madness. There will, of course, be a blowout party to celebrate.
As Monday night turned into Tuesday morning, a few hours after the successful deployment of the first Met gala in more than two years, Timothée Chalamet, one of the official hosts of this year’s event, hoisted himself above the top part of his booth at the Boom Boom Room and shimmied up to a wooden banquette. Chalamet, who rocked Chuck Taylors and his trademark insouciance, was in a private-ish section circled by a few heirs to billionaire fortunes. But he didn’t seem to notice that, and pressed a reporter about a mutual friend who published fiction at Duke. It was around two in the morning.
“You know, it’s crazy, all of this,” Chalamet said. “But hosting it, it’s actually pretty easy.”
Crazy and easy—or at least crazy and something resembling normal. A somewhat typical post-Met gala scene unfolded around us at the after-party, this one hosted by space cowgirl Kacey Musgraves. In that single vantage point: There were those billionaire heirs; plenty of people who sell those billionaires clothes; Lorde; Josh O’Connor, the actor who played Prince Charles on The Crown; and a smattering of in-models and hangers-on. Ciara was there too. So were Dan Levy, Maluma, and Charli XCX.
Tyler Mitchell, the artist and photographer whose works are now on view at Jack Shainman, came up the elevator with Jeremy O. Harris, the playwright who, earlier in the night, mid-walk on the red carpet into the Met, had lit a cigarette. Asked why he had chosen that particular moment and venue for a smoke, he said, “because I wanted to.” Rita Ora was there, as attending the Met gala is part of her full-time job. American designer Emily Bode’s attendance backed up the theme of the actual show everyone had just attended. Karlie Kloss stopped by, sans husband Josh Kushner, who was perhaps watching the happy couple’s new baby at their new penthouse at the Puck Building, owned by Kushner Companies.
Around three in the morning, a crew started to form to leave, and Chalamet grabbed the artist JR—a good friend, the actor said—and went to the elevator, trailed by Lorde, Ozark actress Julia Garner, Mitchell, and Harris. The destination was a club a few blocks away, Davide, where Rihanna had announced a party just hours before. The hostess entered with her date, ASAP Rocky, as the crew from the Boom Boom Room arrived. Inside it was a classic mid-aughts Meatpacking joint happily dotted with fake plants. Chance the Rapper nodded, his head flanked by security. (“Why does Chance the Rapper have so many security guards?” one attendee asked.) Russell Westbrook, in Ralph Lauren, declined to comment on his off-season trade from the Wizards to the Lakers.
And while Rihanna and Rocky might have struck up a world-shattering romance in the middle of a pandemic, one detail pointed undeniably to the return to a certain kind of normalcy in America. In the back of a Richie Akiva club, at an after-party for the Met gala, at four in the morning, in front of the full accoutrement of bottle service, sat Leonardo DiCaprio: Yankees cap on, mask strapped, surrounded by a posse as the new Drake record played loud.
For the full scope of Met gala madness, read my unabridged report, written with my colleague Dan Adler. And that does it for this edition of True Colors. Next week, we’ll be reporting on-the-scene on the Rhine as Art Basel gets underway for the first time since 2019. Got tips? Send ‘em to nate_freeman@condenast.com
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