Almost exact­ly a year ago, I caught up with Jori Finkel, a jour­nal­ist who cov­ers the Los Ange­les arts scene, and we talked about an art-world con­tro­ver­sy that she first wrote about in The New York Times. The con­tro­ver­sy focused on muse­ums seek­ing fund­ing from art gal­leries, which can be a direct con­flict of inter­ests, and her lead exam­ple was L.A.’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art. Well, it turns out now that MOCA is in seri­ous finan­cial trou­ble, with its annu­al oper­at­ing costs run­ning up to $20 mil­lion and its endow­ment plung­ing below $10 mil­lion. It also turns out that last year’s scan­dal should have sent up some red flags. So we decid­ed to do a fol­low-up inter­view with Jori and get her take on MOCA’s fis­cal cri­sis and bailout plans.

DC: We’ve seen a lot of banks and finan­cial insti­tu­tions look­ing for bailouts, and the more we inves­ti­gate them, the more we real­ize these insti­tu­tions were sim­ply act­ing reck­less­ly. When the his­to­ry of this cri­sis gets writ­ten, I imag­ine that we’ll real­ize that it wasn’t just the banks that mis­man­aged their funds and got caught on a limb. Is that what we’re see­ing here with MOCA?

JF: I’m not aware of any crazy exec­u­tive bonus­es or expen­sive com­pa­ny retreats if that’s what you mean. No, what we’re look­ing at here are two rather clas­sic non­prof­it man­age­ment prob­lems: under-fund­ing and over­spend­ing. L.A. Times crit­ic Christo­pher Knight took MOCA trustees to task for not cough­ing up enough cash, and I’ve also writ­ten a lot about the cri­sis in cul­tur­al phil­an­thropy in L.A. The biggest prob­lem is that Hol­ly­wood types would rather give mon­ey to a cause, envi­ron­men­tal or polit­i­cal, than to the arts.

But it’s naïve just to say the muse­um is under-fund­ed. They were clear­ly over­spend­ing. Their staff bal­looned to 200 while their endow­ment was shrink­ing, and muse­um ambi­tions clear­ly out­stripped their actu­al, legit­i­mate sources of fund­ing. In most busi­ness­es, that would be rea­son to rethink, retrench, down­size. That appar­ent­ly hasn’t hap­pened on a large enough scale here. They seem to have put artis­tic ideals ahead of finan­cial realities–putting what the muse­um should exhib­it ahead of what it can afford to exhib­it.

DC: Dur­ing our inter­view last year, you raised some doubts about how MOCA was fund­ing its major Muraka­mi show. In ret­ro­spect, was that an ear­ly sign that things were going wrong at the muse­um? Were there oth­er red flags?

JF: Yes, I think the fact that MOCA was hus­tling mon­ey for its Muraka­mi show from com­mer­cial deal­ers who rep­re­sent the artist was a sign of finan­cial trou­ble and maybe even des­per­a­tion. It looks in ret­ro­spect like a bright red flag. You raised the per­fect ques­tion last year: Why was MOCA engag­ing in this prac­tice when so many oth­er muse­um lead­ers spoke out against it as uneth­i­cal?

Anoth­er ear­ly warn­ing sign came when the muse­um start­ed clos­ing down the Gef­fen Con­tem­po­rary for a few months at a time. Some reporters are treat­ing this fact like it’s new. It’s not. There was even a time three or four years ago when the MOCA web site car­ried a notice to film scouts—essentially say­ing the Gef­fen is yours for the right price. Can you imag­ine the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York doing this?

(more…)

A good days for fans of open cul­ture: Google is bring­ing the mas­sive LIFE pho­to archive online. 2 mil­lion pho­tos are already uploaded, and anoth­er 8 mil­lion will be com­ing online soon. The cur­rent archive moves from The Amer­i­can Civ­il War to present, and it includes a large num­ber of pho­tos nev­er seen before. Here’s one of MLK Jr, anoth­er of Pablo Picas­so, and then one of FDR. All of these images will be added to Google Image Search, but if you want to peruse the col­lec­tion, you can sim­ply access it here. You can also read more about this ambi­tious under­tak­ing on Google’s cor­po­rate blog.

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