Seeking a Wise Spender

These days, the typical priority for an art museum search committee setting out to find a new director is to locate a candidate who raises money well. Less attention gets paid to identifying candidates who know how to spend money well.

Spending money is easy; spending it well is not. The effort in fact takes more talent and reaps more public benefit than raising it well ever could.

A new search committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art is about to come face to face with the problem. On Monday, Richard Koshalek confirmed that, come summer 1999, he will step down as MOCA’s director after almost 17 years at the helm.

Of course, in these highly competitive times for the nonprofit sector, getting cash is the necessary prelude to spending it. Hence our skewed priority. Just how twisted things can get is reflected in standard museum programs, which are increasingly larded with fake blockbusters and hollow homages to a narrow band of celebrity artists, all cynically designed to compete with the local cineplex for the public’s entertainment dollar.

Koshalek’s announcement brings to 23 the number of museum affiliates of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors who are currently engaged in looking for a new director. The number is relatively high. Usually, according to association executive director Mimi Gaudieri, at any given time about a dozen of the association’s 174 members are looking for a new director. Presently, almost twice that number are.

The last time the number was this high was in the early 1990s. Remember the recession? Money again. Economic pressures always make museum trustees nervous, and when trustees get nervous, directors get scratched.

In a recent telephone conversation, Gaudieri said she thinks the current number of director vacancies is mostly an aberration, not a sign of deeper problems in the field. About a quarter of them, including the one imminent at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, represent a generational swell in recent or impending retirements from the profession. (The Hammer’s Henry Hopkins, who has directed three museums in his long career, is one example.)

Another quarter represent the usual game of musical chairs, as when Whitney Museum of American Art director David Ross accepted a recent offer to take the top job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The California institution was bumped off the vacancy list, the New York museum put on it.

Gaudieri also observed, though, that the rate of turnover among directors is on the rise. While hard statistics aren’t available, there are members of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors who have been at their jobs for two decades or more, and a long tenure at a single institution was once the norm. Today, it’s increasingly common for a director to change museums every five to 10 years.

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By that measure, Koshalek’s 17 years as director of MOCA will have been unusual (he was deputy director for another two years before that). Surely one salutary benefit of his longevity is the image of relative stability and productivity the museum now enjoys.

MOCA has a very high profile in international art circles, in ways much older institutions of comparable size like San Francisco’s MOMA and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art do not. MOCA’s permanent collection is better overall than San Francisco’s or Chicago’s, its track record of organizing significant exhibitions is stronger and its two exceptional facilities (at California Plaza and in Little Tokyo) offer a more flexible range of exhibition possibilities.

A $40-million endowment, which will grow to $50 million by 2001, when pledges to the current capital campaign are all in hand, makes the place even more attractive. MOCA is on a comfortable fiscal par with its rivals in San Francisco and Chicago and a bit ahead of New York’s Whitney.

In many ways the story of MOCA to date is Koshalek’s story, too. By most accounts he raised money well. By my account, he also spent it pretty well.

In addition to the impressive collection and buildings, when I think of major exhibitions organized by the museum during his directorship, I think of two principal kinds. One is shows about architecture, an area of special interest to the director, which has given MOCA a distinctive profile. The other is big historical theme shows.

Koshalek has supported MOCA’s curators in assembling hugely ambitious chronicles of important subjects: the surprising transition from Abstract Expressionist painting into Pop, the hidden history of Conceptual art, the emergence of photographically based art into current prominence, the great Case Study project in postwar single-family housing and the tangled international relationships between performance or process-oriented art and contemporary painting and sculpture (this last show, called “Out of Actions,” is currently drawing crowds to the museum).

Two others were critical flops (“The Automobile and Culture” and “Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945”), but the rest are among the most memorable shows organized anywhere in the last decade. Five hits out of seven at-bats is a terrific rate of success--especially since most American museums balk at even attempting such shows.

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Large-scale solo exhibitions are what invariably demonstrate where a museum person’s deepest artistic sympathies lie. Koshalek has organized four for MOCA, all of them important (a fifth, on Richard Serra’s recent monumental sculpture, opens in September). Two surveyed the work of architects (Louis I. Kahn and Arata Isozaki). Notably, only one of the five focused on an artist identified with L.A.--1993’s Robert Irwin retrospective.

While no one has been more indefatigable a regional booster than Koshalek, I think that fact is telling. A critical sense that MOCA could be the primary catalyst for writing the powerful, still uncharted history of postwar art produced in L.A. was one early hope for the museum. But it has failed to materialize.

MOCA has certainly played host to important retrospectives of L.A.-based artists, such as John Baldessari and Alexis Smith, and 1992’s “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” established international careers for several noteworthy figures. But, in number, they’ve been far outpaced by substantive shows of New York and European artists. Of historical theme shows, only the Case Study House survey focused on L.A.’s recent past.

A museum with a parochial outlook is of course the last thing anybody needs, because maintain

ing a global perspective is essential to modern survival. And L.A.-based artists have rightly figured in all seven of MOCA’s big theme shows.

Still, the gap is inescapable. Parochial museums shut out the larger world, drowning in a narcissistic puddle, while cosmopolitan museums--like MOCA--look outward. But a cosmopolitan museum must also hone the complex perspective from which it sees the bigger world. Unraveling the knot of local history is essential to the enterprise.

What’s more: As the shape of global culture begins to look more and more like Los Angeles, the need for hard-nosed historical reckoning is acute.

As director, Koshalek has built a strong foundation for the young museum. Now, in much the way New York’s Museum of Modern Art once did for an older European idea of Modernism, the stage is set for MOCA to emerge as the leading American chronicler of art forged in the contemporary crucible of mass culture. No other museum is better positioned for the task.

So, the job is a plum. Now all that’s needed is a candidate for director with the capacity to raise money well--and to spend it even better.