From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Looking to Repair a Reputation
Mass MoCA's Joseph Thompson talks about the Christoph Büchel fiasco
North Adams, Mass.--The news from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has been one long string of positives since it opened in 1999, and even in the 12 years prior to that when its founders and backers offered up the museum project as an economic stimulant for the blighted city of North Adams. However, since last spring and intensifying in the summer, Mass MoCA (as it is called) has come in for an unrelenting stream of criticism from all quarters of the art world, not for the works on display but for the breakdown in relations between the museum and one of its artists in residence.
It is a long, complicated story in which neither the museum nor the artist in question, a 41-year-old Swiss installation artist named Christoph Büchel, has come out looking good. But at least a ruling by a federal district judge on Sept. 21 on their legal dispute absolved the museum of violating an aspect of U.S. copyright law known as moral rights. Various elements of the art world may scream bloody murder about the ruling, but those same people have been denouncing the museum's director, Joseph Thompson, all year long, so he can probably handle that.
Asked in 2005 to take up residency at Mass MoCA and create a new installation over six weeks in mid-2006--with the show originally slated to open to the public by last December--Mr. Büchel gave museum officials a growing wish list of found-object elements. It was always more, more, more, never a fixed list. "He would drive around North Adams, pointing to things, and say: 'I want that. I want that,'" Mr. Thompson said. The installation, titled "Training Ground for Democracy," was to offer a wry commentary on American-style democracy, and perhaps the too-much-is-never-too-much theme of the display infected the artist's aspirations as well.
"What surprised me," the 48-year-old Mr. Thompson said, "is this notion that museums as commissioning agents, as patrons of the arts, should simply be willing and ready and able to deal with the art diva, even if his demands arise from nowhere, because they are an expression of passion. It was all 'the artist has rights' and we at the museum have 'responsibilities,' and we heard very little about the artist's responsibilities and our rights.
This notion of the free-spirit artist, whirling around in their own orbit, toiling away against constraint, irrespective of all those other people and realities, is an early modernist, romantic idea. It is also an idea that most of the artists we have worked with, most of the artists I know and respect, do not share, particularly in projects that require a high degree of collaboration and respect and responsibility, where there are deadlines."
This is the story: Mr. Büchel finally showed up on Oct. 29, 2006, to create a massive assemblage artwork for the football-field-size gallery in Building 5 of Mass MoCA. "Training Ground for Democracy," which was supposed to have been placed on display starting last December, went way over budget, but the problem (problem No. 1) was that there had been no formal budget or written agreement of what was to be produced and what that production would involve. (In July 2007 at a preliminary hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Ponsor chided the museum for its lackadaisical approach, stating: "Jeez, a second-year law student could have drafted a contract that would have eliminated 90% of the problems that the parties are now arguing about. . . . ")
Mr. Thompson defended his approach, stating that "we enter these relationships based on goodwill and good faith," but goodwill and faith can't be a one-way street: Mr. Büchel provided Mass MoCA staffers with an ever-growing list of items he wanted the museum to find and purchase for the installation, such as a movie theater, a mobile home, a carousel, a voting booth, a police car, a bus, an oil tanker, a jetliner's fuselage--stuff that would be burned or smashed, then hung from the ceiling or placed around the gallery as the artist saw fit. Before Mr. Thompson said "enough" back in January, causing the artist to stay in Switzerland and refuse to complete the installation, more than $300,000 had been spent on Büchel's wish list, almost double the $160,000 that Thompson had casually mentioned back in the fall of 2006 in a note to the artist about other things, no small sum for a museum with an annual budget of only $800,000 (problem No. 2). (Mass MoCA earns its money from admissions, rent from commercial tenants at the site and from donations and gifts from individuals and foundations, in approximately equal proportions.)
When talks between the museum and the artist failed, Mr. Thompson decided to take Mr. Büchel to court on May 21 (problem No. 3) in order to determine whether the museum would be violating the Visual Artists Rights Act, an extension of federal copyright law, if it exhibited the as-yet-uncompleted installation. Until that ruling came down, Mass MoCA staffers placed tarpaulins over the various elements of the installation, making them unviewable to the public but also suggesting that there was some problem with the art that needed to be hidden from the public. Problem No. 4.
Criticism from around the art world has been heaping up. The Boston Globe's then-art critic Ken Johnson described Mass MoCA's actions as "sad, dumb and shameful." A New York Times critic, Roberta Smith, noted that "by opening this strange quasi display, Mass MoCA does . . . damage to itself and to its reputation as a steward of art and as a conduit between living artists and the public." Newsweek critic Peter Plagens gave the pox-on-both-your-houses verdict--"The artist (he hopes) comes off as a genius just a little too brilliant for this dumbed-down world, and the museum comes off as a stuffy, pusillanimous censor of real creativity."
A pained expression is evident on Mr. Thompson's still boyish face. "I spend nights rolling and thinking about exactly what decision started this avalanche that was impossible to stop," he said, but each decision may have been one too late. Throughout the process, he and the other staffers at Mass MoCA did things the way that they'd done them before, ways that had garnered them praise in the past. When discussions with Mr. Büchel reached an impasse, Mr. Thompson said, he sought the right thing to do. "We didn't just open the show to the public, which we might have done. Nor did we just back up the trucks to the door and shovel the material out, which we might have done."
Hoping to force a negotiated solution, Mr. Thompson chose to take the artist to court, seeking in a declaratory judgment what the museum's options actually were. Things didn't work as intended: Mr. Büchel refused to budge, and an outcry over a large contemporary art museum suing an individual artist reverberated throughout the art world, obscuring Mr. Thompson's hopes and even the facts of the case.
Prevailing in court doesn't mean convincing the world (just ask O.J. Simpson), and Mr. Thompson, who has devoted the past 20 years to Mass MoCA, knows he has repair work to do. That process begins with a recap of the museum's experience as a patron of artists: "We've probably worked with well over 800 artists over the past eight years at Mass MoCA," he said.
He continues with a defense of Mass MoCA's noncontracts: "Our deals with artists are, if nothing else, the model of simplicity. We say, come here, spend a certain amount of time--four or six weeks--and make a new work. Sometimes, we have a very clear understanding of what that work will be, sometimes we don't. There is usually some sense of scope."
Mr. Thompson came back again and again to his disdain for formal contracts, for agreements with artists that are "heavily mediated by pages and pages of contingencies and remedies, papering, all of which is anathema to me." It is not clear why he is so bothered by written agreements: Artists are commissioned all the time to create public art projects by city, state and federal agencies, as well as by corporations, hospitals, universities and other institutions and individuals, and the process doesn't somehow get gummed up by the existence of a formal document. Contracts exist to provide clarity, not to obscure it.
What is clear is that he doesn't plan to add more paper and lawyering to the agreements he creates with artists, nor will he be more selective about the artists asked to come for a residency. "There could be some small risk that it could happen again," he said. "You rely on good will, and I'm willing to rely on that. If it happens again, and it might, I still hope to maintain the same statistical average that we have in the past; we'll be just fine. We can put up with one Büchel every three, four or five hundred artists. If that's the cost of being able to do the other projects, I will accept that risk."
Mr. Grant is the author of "The Business of Being an Artist" (Allworth).
