I’m not much for news reporting, which is to say, repeating what is (better) announced in other outlets. Certain exceptions are necessary in all things extraordinary, and Jeffrey Deitch, no ordinary man of arts, now provides this occasion.
Deitch started as a receptionist at the Leo Castelli Gallery before earning a Harvard Business School MBA and eventually founding one of New York City’s premiere contemporary art galleries — in three separate spaces. In less than fifteen years, Deitch Projects has become an emblem of intelligent, progressive, and farsighted curatorial practice. Now he will, it seems, assume control of the largest gallery space imaginable; he has just accepted the directorship of the L.A. MOCA (http://www.moca.org/pdf/press/MOCAAnnouncesNewDirector.pdf).
One might wonder how this venerable Manhattan enterprise will be directed from here out. It won’t (http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/jeffrey-deitch-makes-his-move-la-deitch-projects-will-close). To be sure, the qualitative work, too, will change for Deitch, whose charter will now center on the management of a much larger institution, if one with a sense of the contemporary that has remained harmonious with his own. Hopefully the risk-taking sentiment that brought Jeff Koons, Mariko Mori, Vanessa Beecroft, and Barry McGee to American prominence will find in the new venue an amplified forum for similar opportunity. And yes, there is space for new media art, should the conversation improbably embrace it.