Telegrams and Anger: Mass MoCA vs Christoph Büchel edition

It is amazing how quickly you fall back into things. I was no sooner back from our mercifully Interwebs-free vacation on the Adriatic for only a few hours before something on the other side of the world to cause worry. I’ve been following the Christoph Büchel/Mass MoCA standoff from afar. I had covered MoCA for years at the Eagle, and had reported on the opening salvos of this preposterous dust-up. I was at first amused by it all, but now I’m disappointed that the arts world appears to be too far up its own ass to give the museum the full-throated support it deserves. The story is really quite simple, but is unnecessarily confused by people with an agenda to push. Mass MoCA, despite its modest financial resources and out of the way location, has become one of the most cutting edge spaces for large-scale installation works in the world thanks to its cavernous Building 5 and a team of dedicated staffers who move heaven and earth for them (even when they are flops, like the Höller exhibit “Amusement Park” that had been installed before). For this year the plan for the space was the first big North American project by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, which ran into serious snags as his proposed project ran way over budget. He eventually walked out on the project in a huff, and the rest is litigation. MoCA made the unfortunate decision to open what they had to the public, raising questions about betraying the artists intentions, and sued for violating his contract. It is an unfortunate turn of events – I wish MoCA had just sued for damages for costing them a season they could ill afford to loose and make him pay to clean his crap out of the building himself, but the museum had to do something with its marquee space during the vital summer tourist season. Last week, a federal judge agreed with the museum, and saw past the scaremongering of Büchel’s lawyers about how the rights of all artists are now infringed because, I guess, they’ll now have to sign specific contracts and fulfill the obligations in them. The response of much of the arts community, and the reporters and writers that are supposed to be covering it, has been amazing. Now that I am a private citizen and not a reporter covering Berkshire county, I can admit that I am a great admirer of MoCA and the people that work there. I know what they do and have done, how much they mean to the community where I have so many ties, and how despite its size and reputation, it remains still an experiment resting on a very shaky foundation. So the public pile-on they have had to endure for the sake of this art-world princeling is too much. I saw it first in a July essay by the Boston Globe’s art critic, Ken Johnson, who had the nearsightedness to write that the whole affair “affirms popular perceptions of our most innovative contemporary artists as frauds and charlatans.” Of course, the only honest answer to the question about where that reputation comes from is behavior like Büchel's. Johnson seems to assert that museums should just shut up and enjoy the ride, which seems to me a variation on the sick old adage about what to do if you know you are going to be unavoidably raped. It got worse when Roberta Smith of the Times weighed in, also rising to the defense of those suffering toilers in the trenches of art, who are attacked by an uncaring public and whipped by the taskmasters at non-profit museums who makes them weep blood for their work. “Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor towards artists,” she writes, strings soaring in the background as the camera pans the Sistine Chapel. “It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.” And continuing: “In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, ‘this is not a work of art unless I say so.’” If we are interested in cute postmodern games about authorship and authenticity, we ought to at least acknowledge that much of the best twentieth century art was supposed to makes us ask just what magic, Olympian power put the crown on the head of the “artist” and made his declaration of “art” more important than my declaration of “bullshit.” (And, when he is not quite so dyspeptic, Büchel himself is apparently big on these sorts of questions. From the press materials for his recent London show Simply Botiful: “Büchel repeatedly manipulates and exploits the perceived power of the social and legal contract, subverting the relationship between artist and audience while insisting on a more active political role for both.” There are moments when the hypocrisy of all this is so overwhelming I have to think it’s actually one big meta-exhibit. If so, I really wish he’d done his homework and screwed around with some money-pile like the Guggenheim). Smith uses very high-minded talk to defend a system that is strangling all those noble and sublime things she is yabbering about. As my former colleague John Mitchell of the Transcript notes on his blog, this is “a piece of NYC art world insider crap… [that] speaks about MoCA as if it were a billion dollar movie studio seeking a final cut rather than a non-profit art museum still working to become self-sufficient.” True. Büchel's supporters have reduced this to a matter of intellectual property, with the assumption that the museum is assuming a role that does not belong to it, for some nefarious, unspoken reason. What to the right-thinking aesthete could it possibly be? Power and glory? I don’t think there is a moment in MoCA’s history that could suggest they are power-mad solipsists. Could it be money? Ah. Contemporary art’s ruling class are the ones that make the fortunes and distribute the crowns for the heads of folks like Büchel: the gallery owners and the elaborate network of enablers that has sprung up to prop up this sad system. Self-absorbed geniuses like Büchel are churned out of the world’s art schools faster than the system can absorb them, and the ones that make it usually have enough sense to keep their ego in check while they’re blowing other people’s money. They don’t know and don’t care where it comes from, as long as it has no whiff of the real world on it and includes lots of encouragement of what a genius they are. That’s how it goes in the “art world,” a sick money orgy with the kind of screwed-up values you’d expect from a multibillion dollar industry, served by groveling arts press that can’t think for itself anymore. It is no wonder so few people give a damn about contemporary art anymore – a pathetic situation which happens to be Mass MoCA’s mission to correct in some small way. This stupid mess has caused incalculable harm to an institution that personally means a lot to me. And as far as I’m concerned that is what, as Ken Johnson might say, makes this a “sad, dumb and shameful” episode.