Former MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel will join the gallery Hauser & Wirth as a full partner to open Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles in 2015.
It’s been almost a year since Schimmel’s controversial and abrupt departure (some say firing, others resignation) after his 22-year tenure at MOCA, which provoked the public resignations of four major artist board members. “I believe that MOCA’s strengths have always been in relationship to the outstanding scholarly curatorial practice it had established,” said former trustee and artist Catherine Opie. “What concerns me is seeing the museum embracing more celebrity and fashion.” The provocative new MOCA Director Jeffrey Dietch had himself only recently made the opposite jump from the commercial world to the nonprofit world.
This distinction between the museum and the commercial gallery, between nonprofit and for-profit, seems to be blurring, as is discussed in an interesting article about Schimmel’s decision in Art F City. Some see this shift as positive (as in many comments on Schimmel’s recent move), some see it as negative (as was articulated during the Dietch controversies), and some are merely cautious (as stated by USC’s Fisher Museum of Art director Selma Holo to LA Times’ Culture Monster: “One understands that these worlds blend, but there are still or should be some lines that are not crossed.”)
If Jeffrey Dietch is bringing the commercial world to museums, it sounds like Paul Schimmel plans to bring a bit of a museum sensibility to the new gallery. “I think it’s going to be quite different in the respect that it will be done on a larger scale, have fewer exhibitions and a combination of selling and non-selling exhibitions,” said Schimmel to the LA Times. He said he imagines three to five exhibitions a year that “come out of the Hauser & Wirth program but feel more museum-like in terms of scale, scholarship and complexity.” And, according to their press release, “Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will place significant emphasis upon education and public programs, offering an array of on-going events and activities inspired both by its exhibitions and the local culture.”
Schimmel began his career at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where he was a curator from 1975 to 1977 and senior curator from 1977 to 1978. He served as the chief curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, from 1981 to 1989. In 1990, he became chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), a position he held until 2012.
YouTube announced a new subscription service Thursday, opening the door to a whole new way to pay for content on the popular video sharing site, and possibly changing the game for over-the-internet video delivery. A pilot program allows users to subscribe for a 99¢- $2.99 per month to thirty channels, and will test whether users who will watch through 30 second ads to get the videos they want will pay up front. Stay tuned!
Perhaps forming the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, LACMOCA, and saving two letters!? Talk about merging the two institutions has bobbed to the surface before, most recently in 2008, just before MOCA was rescued by billionaire Eli broad, but this time the idea was initiated by the MOCA board itself. LACMA director Michael Govan outlined the proposed merger in a letter to the MOCA board, describing a deal that would keep the MOCA’s current locations and name, but tie the two institutions together financially.
ARTPIX, Houston-based art-magazine-on-a-disc, has released a 3-disc DVD, Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Park Avenue Armory Event 2011, in collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Trust. The DVDs document the final performance of the Cunningham Company at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 67th St. in New York on December 29-31, 2011. Six performances featuring fourteen dancers dancing “excerpts” of fifty years of choreography on three separate stages are a retrospective goodbye to an era in modern dance.
David Velasco writing in Artforum in December called it “One of the best films of 2012″, noting that it was “not released in theaters or shown at any festivals or streamed on Netflix or anywhere,” which of course makes it all the more exclusively desirable. Exclusivity notwithstanding, the set is still not overpriced- $60 from Microcinema International, or only 21 cents for each of the film’s 279 minutes! Feel free to sit, stand, or wander to observe the various dances being simultaneously performed on the three stages, all inside your TV!
Sean ??, aka NEKST has died. He began writing as Next in Houston in 1996, and was voted “best Graffiti writer” in 2003, by the Houston Press, even as they suggested he move to escape relentless police pressure. He did a stint in Austin; Rachel Koper of Austin’s Women and Their Work Gallery had this remembrance: “He lived in atx for some years before he went ‘dash snow’ in NYC. It breaks my heart. I kicked him out of Gallery Lombardi several times in 2003!! He kept coming back anyway. Offered to be my security guard and other bull. the Kid was tenacious.” He later was active in New York as part of the MSK crew (Mad Society Kings) before his death. Juxtapoz magazine has this hundred-pic tribute to the hardworking artist, well-known for his widespread, large-scale works.
Excavations for a new subway station in Rome had unsurprisingly, run afoul of “the most important Roman discovery in 80 years”, according to the Guardian (UK). While tunneling under the ancient Italian capital, railway workers uncovered an amphitheater built by the Emperor Hadrian in 123 c.e., which has been excavated and will open to the public soon, 18 feet beneath the busy Piazza Venezia. Railway engineers think that the new subway station can be squeezed in, using one of the original roman hallways as an exit to street level.
The third subway line in Rome runs 80 feet underground, below the level of the city’s earliest habitation, but has to come up sometimes for air shafts and stations, each time seeking the path of least resistance through ancient, medieval, renaissance and modern construction. It’s a mixed blassing for archeologists: something historic always gets destroyed, but funding to do the digging would not be forthcoming otherwise.
MoMA Prepares for Fiscal Cliff with Kim Kardashian Look-Alike Contest at Mondrian Hotel
The Art Newspaper (Art Basel Edition) reports that the fiscal cliff, and attendant economic uncertainty if anything, has been good for sales of high-end art at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair this week. Melanie Gerlis, Gareth Harris and Riah Pryor interviewed collectors and dealers who felt that the looming tax uncertainty for the wealthiest Americans was driving a perceived flight towards art as a solid investment. saying that collectors were “using art as a medium-term store of value while other potential investments are proving volatile.”
On Thursday The Whitney Museum announced three curators for the 2014 Whitney Biennial: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer, curator of film at Tate modern, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia associate curator Anthony Elms assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and Michelle Grabner, chair of the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will select the artists and works for the museum’s 77th bi-annual. Each of the three will curate a floor of the exhibition, advised by the Whitney’s staff curators Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders. The show opens in March 2014
Art critic Jerry Saltz has gotten the collecting bug- but, not being able to afford the seven-figure prices of the Gerhard Richter paintings he craved, instead challenged artists to fake one for him. He details his trials and eventual success at commissioning a satisfyingly Richterian abstraction for $155, and the promise and challenge of what he calls “little dick art” in New York Magazine. “I’ve got a Kara Walker cutout on order. Calders, Duchamps, Rothkos are all on the way. My wife is worried. So am I.”
Intrepid local TV news reporters tracked Uriel Landeros to Monterrey, where he is hiding out from charges of felony graffiti and criminal mischief in Houston after allegedly spray painting over Picasso’s Woman in Red Armchair at the Menil Collection. In a brief interview with KPRC TV’s Nefertiti Jacquez, Landeros claims association with the Occupy movement, and that his alleged action was aimed at righting wrongs and exposing the corruption of banks, government and large institutions in the United States and Mexico. Asked if he plans to return to Houston to face the charges, he said “it’s not my priority right now,” as commenters on the video froth.
In related news, the Yes Men, also claiming affinity with the Occupy movement, also using direct actions to publicize their positions, but so far staying just on the right side of the law, have almost reached the $100,000 goal for the Kickstarter campaign to fund their new movie!
Perhaps forming the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, LACMOCA, and saving two letters!? Talk about merging the two institutions has bobbed to the surface before, most recently in 2008, just before 
