Motivated by ‘Greed’

The one person almost certain to be at any art opening of note in Orange County is Kenneth J. Kleinberg. A longtime collector of contemporary art and an attorney whose Costa Mesa practice is partly devoted to art law, Kleinberg is co-chairman of the joint collections trust committee for the Orange County Museum of Art and the Laguna Art Museum.

Yet when the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art asked Kleinberg, 46, to select the art for its 17th annual juried exhibition, the initial flattering glow gave way to doubt.

“I had a panic attack after I agreed,” he said recently. “The first thing that came to my mind is, ‘Oh my God, what if I can’t make up my mind?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, what if I can’t find anything?’ ”

As it turned out, he winnowed down 300 slides of work, submitted mostly by artists outside the greater Los Angeles area, to 31.

Kleinberg said he found the process “an interesting challenge” because “it’s really difficult to judge work by slides” and “the best of the work wasn’t necessarily thematic.”

“Greed,” the theme the center chose for the show, initially struck Kleinberg as “kind of mundane.” So in his brief exhibition statement, he emphasized the role of greed in the art world, where, as he writes, “the artist, the gallery, the consultant, the broker, the academic, the institution, the patron and the collector are all a part of a perverse and incestuous daisy chain of incestuous desire.”

Although he will wait to see the works he selected in person before bestowing the obligatory prizes on Saturday, Kleinberg singled out “Death of an Inflatable Dream,” a New York artist’s inflatable sex doll in a coffin, as “perhaps the best of the thematic pieces.”

Kleinberg confessed that none of his selections for OCCCA appeals to his taste as a collector. In fact, having weathered his first jurying experience, he’d rather curate a show from scratch than be obliged to rely on a random batch of entries.

Nevertheless, he draws a clear distinction between finding a work compelling on some level and liking it or wanting to acquire it.

“People are surprised when I say I don’t collect the best art I see,” he said. “But the best work is often very powerful and sometimes disturbing, and I don’t want to get up every morning and get kicked in the chest, thank you.”

The kind of art Kleinberg prefers to live with is “something that puts a smile on my face. . . . Something that has a little twist or a little perversion or that distinguishes itself from the rest of the crowd. . . . It’s that simple, that nebulous and that complex.”

* A reception and awards night for “Greed” will be held Saturday from 7-10 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 208 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday. Ends Nov. 15. (714) 667-1517.