Podcast #54: Jeffrey Deitch on Art and Spectacle
Jeffrey Deitch may best be known for his visionary gallery Deitch Projects, but now the artist-curator-dealer is adding a new title: writer. In honor of the release of his book Live the Art, Deitch joined us at LIVE from the NYPL with New Museum Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni. For this week's New York Public Library Podcast episode, we're honored to present the two champions of contemporary art discussing artistic communities, cross-media creation, and spectacle.
Deitch and Gioni LIVE from the NYPL
As Deitch spoke about Deitch Project, he described the ways in which he both sought out artistic communities and created one of his own:
“I've always been interested in finding talent through communities, rather than looking for that one special, isolated genius. Look where there's a community of interest, connecting with that community, and we embrace those communities, and there are a number of them that we invited in during the year. We invited whole communities, for example, when we did the notorious NEST exhibition. A whole community came with it, and they became part of the gallery community eventually.”
Another way that he created a sense of community was by opening up the gallery world to artists working across media:
“This interesting intersection we all know about of fashion, music, art, film becoming closer and closer with the borders being blurred between this different media is something I've been interested in for a long time, and we encouraged artists who work in this area, encouraged filmmakers like Michel Gondry, who are interested in positioning themselves in the art world, giving them platforms, giving artists who want to make films platforms. So, that was part of what was interesting about being in Soho, where there are film production offices, music studios, of course all the fashion boutiques. And we invited all these people in.”
Although spectacle does often carry a negative connotation, Deitch said that he enjoys spectacle. He spoke about spectacle as a vehicle toward increasing visibility for art without requiring conventional, and sometimes slow, media mechanisms:
“I love the excitement of the spectacle, and a spectacle is something that—I like an artistic project that takes on a life of its own. I did not want to do a conventional gallery, where you put up your show and then you wait for the reviewer, you know, that you just wait for someone to endorse it. I wanted to create projects that had their own energy, that were talked about, that brought people in, and we started this very early on. One of our earliest projects, a notorious project… we didn't exactly exhibit a real dog in the gallery. We exhibited a Russian performance artist who performed as a dog for two weeks, as Oleg Kulik. I read about his notorious performances in Moscow where he appeared as a dog with collar and someone with a chain and viciously attacked the spectators at art events. Very, very controversial. And I said, we've got to get him to New York!”
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