Jeffrey Deitch & BEttina Korek In Conversation

 Portrait by Darren Ankenman

For the better part of the last three decades, Jeffrey Deitch’s project space in New York revolutionized the way galleries exhibited art and the way people experienced art. Today, galleries, museums and institutions everywhere emulate the curatorial style he employed at Deitch Projects. In 2011 he moved west to Los Angeles for his ill-fated appointment at MoCA and purchased Cary Grant’s former home in the Hollywood Hills. This fall, the comeback kid will be opening a new gallery space in Hollywood with a museum sized exhibition of work by Ai Weiwei. Bettina Korek, a native of LA suburb Van Nuys, was recently named executive director of the first edition of Frieze Los Angeles, the blockbuster art fair that originated in London and then New York. She is also a member of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and founder of ForYourArt, which was known for its daring creative programming. 

BETTINA KOREK: I was looking at the book that you produced about the history of Deitch Projects and I wanted to ask, as you think about adapting to the city of Los Angeles, if you’re planning to use the gallery façade? It was such a vital part about what you did in New York. 

JEFFREY DEITCH: It was so much fun to change the façades. The concept of the gallery didn’t stop with the inside.  Artists were welcome to use the façade, the roof and the street. Some of our greatest shows were when artists transformed the façade. 

KOREK:Will you use the façade in LA in the same way? 

DEITCH: The gallery is a platform for artists. If artists have an idea for the façade: absolutely. The Los Angeles program will be different from Deitch Projects in New York. I started Deitch Projects when I was a little over forty years old. I’m sixty-six years old now. I’m in a different stage of life and my ability to connect with artists in their twenties and thirties and be part of their community is not the same. The intention is to present more of a museum-like program. 

KOREK: You talk a lot about the first chapter of New York Deitch Projects as a commercial version of a project room, relating it to the ICA London Is that still the intention? 

DEITCH: We’ll do some fun and engaging things for sure, because I love doing that, but the plan now is to focus on two types of exhibitions. One is a major museum level exhibition with an international level artist, like Ai Weiwei. The space is large, it’s like an exhibition gallery in a museum. I wanted a space of this scale so that I could present great exhibitions. There are a number of important international artists, like Ai Weiwei, who have never shown in Los Angeles, or have not shown in Los Angeles in twenty years. Every year I hope to be able to present one or two solo exhibitions of this level. I know you just visited with Judy Chicago. I will be presenting a major exhibition of her Los Angeles works of the 1960s in the fall of 2019.

KOREK: She said that she admires how throughout the trajectory of your career you’ve been able to balance commercial and non-commercial impact. And she seems really excited about what you’re doing together and the commitment that you’ve made to re-stage her works. Judy Chicago isn’t an artist that immediately comes to mind as someone who is such a part of your world. And looking back at the book too, you’ve defined so many commonly accepted tribes.

 DEITCH: I have worked with artists from more than 20 different countries. 

KOREK: Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times that when Deitch Projects first opened in 1996, you didn’t work with any white, male artists for the first six months. 

DEITCH: I think it was for the first two years that I hadn’t yet shown a white, male artist and it wasn’t something I even thought about, I was just following my interests. It has always been an open, diverse program. I gave Valqie Export her first solo exhibition in the United States. It was a small show, but it was terrific. We included her famous Genitalpanik poster, and fantastic three-dimensional pieces, figures with appliances. It was a great group of works. I also presented a radical show called Womanizer, organized by Kembra Pfahler and some of her friends in the burlesque circle, and the legendary Vaginal Davis. There was a misinformed perception in the LA press, that I was just a power art dealer who came to MOCA to show big-money, male artists. I have a long history of showing radical artists from diverse backgrounds. So, showing Judy Chicago is just an extension of what I’ve been doing for years. 

 KOREK: It’s always been interesting to me how you’ve dovetailed between activities that are explicitly and traditionally commercial and those that seem to be more like labors of love, public spectacles, or otherwise demanding almost a kind of patron—in this case, you—to make them possible. Can you talk about this dynamic in light of your career and the current landscape? 

DEITCH: I always had the luxury in my public programs to take a non-commercial approach, because I had an active advisory and private dealing business. Quietly I was selling a Picasso that was in the Freeport in Geneva. Nobody knew about it except the few people involved in the transaction, but one sale like that would cover a year of programs at the gallery. It didn’t matter if we made money or lost money with the gallery program, so I had this very special situation going because of my earlier background developing and co-managing the Citibank art advisory program in the early eighties. I also have a philosophy about presenting exhibitions, even if the works are seemingly difficult and non-commercial. If I present the work with authority and if I can articulate my belief in the work, I’ve always thought that there would be collectors out there that believe in the work as much as I do and hopefully will buy it. That’s what happened right from the beginning at Deitch Projects. Our opening show was a performance project with Vanessa Beecroft. The documentary video and photographs sold very well to some of the best collectors in the world. The second show was a three-part video projection by a very radical artist, Jocelyn Taylor, with her walking naked down Canal Street. I sold that too, and so it kept going I had expected at the beginning that most of what we showed would not sell and would  become part of my collection, but we actually kept selling, and that reinforced this approach: don’t hold back, if you believe in something that pushes the limits, go for it, because if its good there will be somebody there in the collector community who will like it as much as I do. 

KOREK: Is your intention for Deitch Projects LA to focus onmuseum-style solo exhibitions influenced by your time spent leading MoCA?

DEITCH: Yes, I am trying to be ambitious and present museum level shows. With Judy Chicago, the plan is to present some of the extraordinary works that she made in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Some of the work was destroyed because she could not afford the storage costs at that time and we will be re-fabricating these works. Some of it is now known through Pacific Standard Time a few years back and other exhibitions like, The World Goes Popat the Tate, but it still is underknown. it’s so exciting to present major, historic work by one of the greatest artists of her generation, that has not been seen in fifty years. So, in addition to these solo shows, the other important part of the program is ambitious thematic exhibitions. For example, I have been working for two years on a book entitled Unrealismabout new figurative painting. We presented the Unrealism exhibition in 2015 in Miami in collaboration with Larry Gagosian. Many people who saw the show asked, “Where’s the book?” and I realized that I was on to something that was much bigger than a five day show timed with an art fair. We are planning an exhibition of the twenty-six artists in the book, after the book is released next spring. That’s the type of project that we’re going to be presenting. Unrealism is a thematic show that’s very meaningful for me and I think will help define the contemporary artistic agenda. In addition to the shows that I’ve been working on for a long time, I’m inviting other gallerists, curators, artists to propose projects. The difference between what I’m going to do here in the gallery and what a museum does is the economic structure. So instead of spending months trying to raise funds, it’s much easier for me to finance the exhibitions through sales. That’s the model.

KOREK: In your book Live the Art, you mention that you also didn’t show any paintings early on. 

DEITCH: I always try to be attuned to what’s going on on the edge of artistic creation. So, in the 1990s there was a period of reaction to the painting decade of the ‘80s. The art of that time was characterized by the prominent role artists like of Jean Michael Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring. There were a number of things that happened in art towards the end of eighties. One of them was that the creative community was devastated by the plague of AIDS. And there was a severe economic decline in 1990. Prices crashed, galleries went out of business, so as one might have expected, there was a different kind of art that emerged in the nineties, where it was the opposite of painting - it was art about personal identity and it was performative. This was really the beginning of the global art world, so a lot of the work I showed came from different cultures: Mariko Mori from Japan, Chen Zhen from China, Oleg Kulik from Moscow. 

KOREK: And also, that bridged other fields. You did a lot with fashion and music and science.

DEITCH: That was the next decade. In the 1990s there was a lot of installation art and the art discourse became global. I showed a wonder body of work by Nedko Solokov from Bulgaria. Giant tree trunks were suspended from the ceiling as if they were growing out of the air. It was a very dynamic program that introduced many artists from around the world. A lot of galleries show artists from around the world; I was one of the first American galleries to show artists from Russia, China, South America etc. And then the next decade, the 2000s, trend was another thing that was emerging. It was the beginning of this current wave of crossover culture, where musicians, filmmakers and fashion designers were in dialogue with the art world. We showed Michel Gondry, who came to me because he thought his film work belonged in an art gallery. Jeremy Scott, who I see now in Los Angeles, loved the idea of presenting his annual fashion show in my gallery, as a work of performance art. We made a big, big commitment to this fusion of music and performance with Fischerspooner, and we extended into projects with Santigold, with LCD Soundsystem. It was really interesting, and the audience responded. I think you were at some of those shows in those days. There was nothing like it.

KOREK: And now painting is on the edge?

DEITCH: There are many interesting directions in art today, but there is a very strong revival of abstract and figurative painting. At MoCA I had plans for exhibitions of both abstract and figurative painting. It was a question of, which one to do first, and it was my judgment that the situation with abstract painting was more resolved and more mature, so that’s the show I decided to organize.  I think I made the right decision, because figuration has exploded since then. It is better to have waited until now to take on new figuration. My exhibition of abstract painting, The Painting Factory, with its carpet floor painting by Rudolf Stingel installed throughout the space, was one of the strongest shows I ever presented. We have just created a website to document the show.

KOREK: Was Instagram culture strong then?

DEITCH: No, it didn’t start catching on until 2012. Instagram was just beginning when we showed Art in the Streets. They used Flickr. 

KOREK: Do you ever think in retrospect about how of some of those projects anticipated elements of the experience economy, or how they would be received and proliferated today at the height of phenomena like Instagram and the Museum of Ice Cream?

DEITCH: We helped create that culture with my participatory projects.  Part of my mission with Deitch Projects, wasn’t to be just an art gallery, showing a stable same artists every two years. It was to really engage with contemporary vanguard culture and to contribute to it, to provide a platform where people could meet, and connect. 

KOREK: Have you been to the Museum of Ice Cream? 

DEITCH: I’ve seen pictures of it. I haven’t actually been. 

KOREK: What are your thoughts on that?

DEITCH: Well, it’s a cultural phenomenon. Let usgo back to Art in The Streets. That’s a project I’m so happy I had the opportunity to realize, there was nothing like it in any American museum, a big serious historical show on the history of graffiti and street art. Thousands of people saw the show. Commentators in the art press who didn’t actually see it had this misinterpretation that it wasn’t serious, that it trashed the museum. It was as rigorous as a historical exhibition about Minimalism or feminist art.  For instance, we did not just show Banksy, we showed his influences. We presented a complete collection of the original Sex Pistols poster and album cover designs by Jamie Reid. 

KOREK: Graffiti and street art is such an important part of LA’s creative ecosystem, so it makes sense to me that MoCA would play a part in institutionalizing them. But there seemed to be some kind of critical sentiment that this work was misaligned with the museum’s collection. So there was a kind of tension between the lived visual culture of LA and the supposed life of the museum itself. It’s a thorny topic that has only become more telling of some of the dynamics that are evolving the overall contemporary art landscape.

DEITCH: First of all, I consider the street art show was in the tradition of MoCA’s magisterial show on the history of Minimalism. It was studying this as an essential movement in art and culture. The role of a contemporary art museum is to document and interpret these important artistic innovations. 

KOREK: Did any of the work enter the collection?

DEITCH: No, I wish it had. There is still no definitive collection of street art in an American museum.

KOREK: Usually the art organizations you reference as inspirational to your thinking are ones without collections, like the ICA London or the Drawing Center.

DEITCH: Yes, but, many of the works I showed at Deitch Projects entered the collection of great museums: Museum of Modern Art, Whitney, Guggenheim, etc. I refer to Deitch Projects as a gallery version of an ICA. but, as with any other ambitious gallery showing ambitious artists, the goal was to place key works in key museum collections. We had a very good record of that. 

KOREK: You were also very early to the whole crowd thing, which has seemed to have shifted in the last couple years and museums have placed more value on attracting people. I was reading about Live Through This, you had the book launch and the police came.

DEITCH: Back to the Street Art situation, because you asked about the connection with Instagram. I had a very interesting, enlightening email correspondence with Banksy when I was preparing the exhibitions, as he is so key and influential. Banksy is an artist who is known for wanting to have an adversarial approach to the museum establishment, and I maybe would not have done the show if Banksy had decided not to be in it. It would have been a glaring omission. We got in touch, though I’ve never met him in person, He agreed to participate in the show on two conditions: one was that there be a free day. He’s very adamant that there be public access and that it be free every day. I wasn’t able to get that through with the museum administration, but we settled on free Mondays. I told him I was getting a lot of trouble with the financial people at the museum over all the money we would lose and he said, “Tell me how much money are you going to lose if there is free admission on a Monday?” The museum calculated $50,000. He said, “No problem,” and sent us a check for $50,000. 

Then the other condition was very insightful. He said there has to be open photography. I asked the legal counsel of the museum about the no photography thing. I assumed it had something to do with flashbulbs exploding, and I said, “Isn’t that kind of obsolete?” And she said. “No, that’s not the issue - it is the legal risk of being sued by the copyright holders.” As you know, bureaucracies, even in enlightened places like museums, the answer almost always is ‘no’ to whatever question it is. So finally, we figured out that the only way to allow open photography was to send a letter to every artist, artist rights agency, lender and artist’s estates, asking if we had permission to have open photography. I sent 350 letters. We got responses from everybody and they were all fine with photography. I put a little no photography sign next to one painting because I knew that the estate could be difficult.  I believe it was the first exhibition of its type where there was free photography, but now it’s everywhere and you can’t control it. But this was completely new. I was stunned by what happened. We didn’t have Instagram yet, but of course everybody had their camera phones and this is how people expressed their connection with the works: taking photos in front of their favorite works. In those days people used Flickr and other social media. We didn’t have to advertise. The whole experience in the museum went viral. Then celebrities like P. Diddy wanted to come, and he had his crew taking photos in front of artworks that he liked and then would send the images out on his network. A number of other musicians and actors did the same thing. On the final day of the show there were 8,500 visitors and we realized this was just the beginning. We could have kept it going for anther full year, but there were other shows scheduled. It was an amazing phenomenon. Since then, it’s all opened up and every museum seems to allow photography. If we had had Instagram it would have been way beyond, but it hardly existed yet. 

KOREK: Going backwards, another artist who really affected your idea of [how to engage with] audiences was Barry McGee.

DEITCH: So, I’ve always been interested in subcultures and how they create artistic and cultural innovation. So the graffiti subculture, the skateboard subculture, the surf subculture. Barry McGee is part of all three, and other subcultures as well. So, it was interesting to connect with the skateboard subculture. 

KOREK: So this is <in 19TK>, when you had the first show with him at Deitch Projects?

DEITCH: Barry McGee was one of about fifty artists in Session the Bowl, our show on art and skate culture. The project began with Hamza Walker, who is now Director of LAX Art down the street from our gallery. When Hamza was a curator at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, he created Free Basin, working with the radical architects Simparch to create a wooden empty swimming pool as a skateboard ramp. It was then presented at Documenta. I loved it and asked to bring it to New York. We got the blessing from Hamza and we constructed an even better version of it. One of my gallery directors, Julia Chang, who’s now married to KAWS, was totally inside this subculture and connected us with all the key people. We got the best skaters in New York involved and we put together a team to supervise so kids could come and skate with the champions. Surrounding the bowl, we organized an exhibition of artists connected with the culture, from Barry McGee, to Mike Mills. It was such a dynamic show. One night I was walking by the gallery space and I saw the lights were on, it was like midnight, and I unlocked the door and came in quietly, and was astonished to see was this session of naked people skating. It was actually the Simparch guys themselves. They were skating around a naked statuesque woman, a well-known figure in the art world, who was posing in the center of the bowl.

KOREK: You’ve referred to how closed-off the audience for contemporary art is. Do you think that that’s changed?

DEITCH: Oh, absolutely. There is a much broader audience now. I’m very much a creature of the established vanguard art world. My apprenticeship was with The John Weber Gallery, successor to the Dwan Gallery, showing Sol Le Witt, Robert Ryman, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin – the great minimal and conceptual artists. It was a tight community. The audience was very inside. This was challenging art. It was not art for a wide public. But we had a really active audience, everybody in the world who was interested in this came to the gallery. The New Yorkers came every Saturday, but people came from European countries, from around America, and within a year I had met basically everybody in the art world. It was a very enjoyable, rewarding experience to be inside this community where people had this shared interest. In the 90s when I opened Deitch Projects it was still this inside community, albeit larger, but everybody who came to my gallery was professionally involved in art; either as an artist, writer, collector, or curator. That was the audience. It’s through getting involved with these subcultures: skateboard, graffiti, vanguard fashion that I connected with this larger audience. I realized that the by turn of the millennium there was this completely new audience of younger people that didn’t differentiate between stimulating new art, music and fashion. These were people that wanted stimulation from a variety of different fields, so they followed fashion, new music, art, new literature, and I responded to this by opening up the program to include vanguard figures from all these different fields and it became a big phenomenon. It was a very successful run we had, particularly in the 2000s. A number of the patrons of MoCA would come and enjoy what was going on in my gallery.  We extended our performance program to Art Basel Miami Beach, and to museums. MoCA’s board leadership thought that it would be very interesting to bring my approach to art programming to Los Angeles. They felt that MoCA needed: to connect with this new audience. The core professional art audience is not enough to sustain a big public museum. The idea was to bring a version of this kind of program that I had pioneered to open up MoCA to a larger community.  And that’s what I did. And this audience hasn’t gone away, it’s just gotten bigger. There is now an issue of how you keep the program engaging but rigorous, and not degenerate into the Museum of Ice Cream. It’s an art of creating the right balance. 

KOREK: Would you say this is one of the most compelling insights that you acquired during your tenure at MoCA? Did you think it would be as difficult as it was?

DEITCH: This insight about the new art audience was developed over my experience in the decade of 2000-2010 at Deitch Projects. That’s where I learned about and understood what was going on and connected with it.

KOREK: Do you think there is anything very different about LA now versus when you started at MoCA? 

DEITCH: Absolutely. 

KOREK: How would you articulate that?

DEITCH: Yes, there are a number of things. One: there’s a continuing acceleration of creative energy here, coming from New York, Berlin, London.  More and more interesting people, like Santigold who is so Brooklyn, is now in Los Angeles. She said that virtually all the music producers and people she needs to work with are here now. She has to be here. And almost weekly there is another artist, creative person moving here. A whole new community has formed. And then the fabricators who artists worked with in Brooklyn and Queens are increasingly going out of business, but you can still find these kinds of fabricators here in Los Angeles. And there are so many artists here who want jobs as artists assistants. So there is this general direction of creativity coming here, and of course it’s not just visual art and music: its people who want to start restaurants and many other creative ventures, so it’s more and more exciting. Then there’s another important change. The LA art world had been very tribal. 

KOREK: Isn’t the international art world still pretty tribal? 

DEITCH: Yes, it is. But LA was particularly tribal. There was the UCLA group and the Cal Arts group that sort of merged. The Art Center group. There were still the old school former Ferus gallery stud artists, the feminist group., the muralists. There were these different factions here. In New York city, somehow people are more tolerant and there’s much more mixing between the different groups. Artists don’t identify themselves as being part of art school alumni groups. It was more territorial in LA. 

KOREK: Has that dissipated?

DEITCH: What I think has happened in Los Angeles now is that now this massive influx of artistic talent has diluted this tribal situation, so it’s much less relevant. It used to be that a certain university alumni group controlled a gallery program. MoCA became almost a house museum for UCLA faculty and alumni. That’s part of the problem that I faced. I really admire the work of many of these artists and want to embrace it and present it, but that’s not the only thing going on. So Cholo graffiti artists deserve a platform just as much as UCLA alumni. Not everybody would agree with me on that but that’s something I feel very strongly about. It’s all about rigorous judgments of quality and originality. An artist like Chaz Bojorquez, who invented a whole style that’s influential around the world deserves to be studied in a great art museum. 

KOREK: Do you think that characteristic of LA as an artist city and New York as the market city, does that still hold true? 

DEITCH: That’s your perspective. Growing up in New York, I never considered New York to be primarily the art market city. It was the most dynamic, artistic community on earth. More than Paris in the 20s. 

KOREK: But would you say that better describes LA now? 

DEITCH: Yes, a big influx, so now it’s getting very close to even between the artistic energy in LA and New York. New York still has a lot of dynamism with dozens of great new galleries on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. I wouldn’t say that LA surpasses New York’s creative energy, but in terms of the art market LA is becoming increasingly important.  One of the reasons I’m opening the gallery space here is that for a long time, LA was essentially a local art market and local collectors and a number of the most prestigious LA collectors preferred to buy in New York, so it could be tough going for galleries here. But this has shifted dramatically, because now the gallery situation is so much more active and there are a lot more local people buying here. New Yorkers are coming to LA on special trips to visit artists and galleries. And collectors coming from China and Europe. During the month of August, a number of important European collectors are here visiting artists’ studios, visiting galleries. LA is now becoming an international art market. My art gallery here will not be just for local collectors, its lots of LA collectors, but also collectors from all over the world. 

 KOREK: Is this why it’s taken so long for an art fair to set roots here? Would you say this is part of the reason that one could be successful now? 

DEITCH: The timing is right for Frieze. But also something I’ve learned in my experience is that these innovations don’t just happen out of thin air. Somebody has to make them happen. So we are part of a group that has made Frieze LA happen. This is going to be another very important step in making LA a dynamic art market. This is one of the reasons I’m so enthusiastic about Frieze LA. It’s going to bring a large new local and international audience.

KOREK: What do you think is one of the challenges for the first year? 

DEITCH: The difficulty of navigating Los Angeles. Annie Philbin has a great line, that LA is a terrible place to visit and a great place to live. That’s an exaggeration, but it really took me some time to figure out how to navigate LA. Now we know there are certain times of day we don’t want to go to Venice and learn not to get caught on Sunset Boulevard trying to cross the 405 from Brentwood. So that’s what’s going to be the most difficult people for people who are used to cities like New York and London where you just walk or take a cab. Luckily, we have Uber here now and that’s going to make a big difference. Without Uber, Frieze LA would be a much bigger challenge.

KOREK: Before I end [it], is there anything else you want to say or add?

DEITCH: Yes, Los Angeles is today’s great international city. I love that it is a multicultural city and if you really live Los Angeles you participate in that. You feel it, and I hope that my gallery can reflect that.