You know who I don’t envy right now? Peter Doroshenko, the director of the Dallas Contemporary. Just last week at the press preview for the Contemporary’s Loris Greaud exhibition, Doroshenko was telling me about how excited he was for the new curators he hired, Justine Ludwig and Alison Gingeras. The two women come to the museum with strong credentials, and Ludwig has already proven herself as smart, energetic, and engaged with the local art scene.
At the preview, Doroshenko explained to me that this has always been his vision for the Contemporary’s curator program. He wants to bring in top curatorial talent who can organize intelligent, relevant exhibitions at the museum, while offering them the opportunity to discover artists living here in order to eventually present them to the wider world. Doroshenko was also excited about the exhibitions his two new female curators had in the works. This coming fall, the Contemporary will exhibit three women artists, Bani Abidi, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, and Adriana Varejao. Next spring, there are plans for a feminism show.
“People say we’re a boys club,” Doroshenko said. “But we’re not, it’s just how it worked out with timing and artists’ schedules. But this next year, that’s going to change.”
What, then, do we make of what happened over the weekend? If you haven’t read about it on the Dallas Observer, or Glasstire, or Jezebel, or artnet, or Hyperallergic, Loris Greaud viciously attacked the Dallas Observer’s Lauren Smart over her review of his exhibition, issuing a series of gross, insulting, and sexist comments and insinuations. Moreover, Greaud didn’t just fire off a drunken Facebook rant; he engaged in a sustained back and forth with Smart in which he continued to make lewd, misogynist insinuations. I’m not going to disseminate specifics—if you really want to know what was said, check out Smart’s blog post.
Greaud’s behavior is deplorable, and he embarrasses himself and the institution that exhibited his art. Moreover, Greaud bit the hand that fed him. More than just Greaud, the artist’s comments reflect poorly on the Dallas Contemporary. Doroshenko recognizes the criticism that his institution is a boy’s club; Greaud’s comments threaten to take that reputation to the next level.
I have not made my misgivings about the Dallas Contemporary a secret. I am routinely disappointed by their exhibitions. I reported on the controversy over the sale of artists’ work in their collection on eBay. I have speculated that the museum’s mission under Doroshenko is to insult and flatter in the same breath. At the same time, I’ve always respected Doroshenko and his appetite for playing the role of the provocateur, for skirting the expectations of patrons and art world-ers alike, and for toying with this city’s reputation and self-regard. And no matter how much I have criticized Doroshenko, he remained open, fair, and respectful. In other words, unlike Greaud, Doroshenko knows how to take criticism with grace.
But what does Doroshenko do now? The exhibition, which was supposed to be a coup for the museum – the first U.S. exhibition by a major rising French art star – is now tainted by controversy.
And it is a complicated controversy. As I wrote in my review, Greaud’s exhibition was already designed as a kind of spectacle performance, toying with the conventions of the museum and autonomous readings of art objects. It was intended to be read both as a standalone exhibit and as an exhibit that changes through time—changes physically, but also changes in the way that the hype around the exhibition informs our readings of it. It was created as a kind of sponge for exterior information.
We are supposed to wonder what it means that art was created to be destroyed, while at the same time could be seen in states of pre- and post-destruction. We are supposed to understand the spectacle — both the destruction and the subsequent hype and gossip about the destruction — as part of the artist’s project. Now we have to ask ourselves what it means when a critic destroys that exhibit verbally, and then the artist lashes back in such a deplorable manner. In other words, Greaud’s behavior functions as an aspect of his performance — it is part of how we consider his created museum and the real museum that housed it.
This isn’t just conceptual art babble. Think of it this way. Do you want to go see the work of the artist who broke his art? What about the work of the misogynist artist who said sexist things to a local writer? Greaud is sincerely interested in the way this media-enabled exterior information informed the spectacle of his show. In his review of Greaud’s Contemporary show, Ben Davis cites an article in Frieze: “Gréaud claims his favorite exhibitions are the ones he has not seen, but has only heard about,” the magazine wrote. The idea of his exhibition, the rumor of the exhibition — “The space in between the music,” as Greaud put it during the press preview, citing Stockhausen though perhaps thinking of John Cage or, maybe, Claude Debussy — is the exhibition. Now Greaud’s online tantrum is also part of his exhibition.
I’ve heard that some area artists are so outraged by it all they are considering some sort of protest or demonstration against the Contemporary. This is hearsay, and we will see if it occurs, but such a reaction is not unimaginable. The Dallas Contemporary under Peter Doroshenko has been deliberately provocative, pushing buttons up and down the social and creative ladders in this city. His museum often disturbs my sense of taste and expectations for art. I am free to say I don’t like some of what he shows, but then he is also free to show art I don’t like. I find this all very interesting. But while I have respected this about Doroshenko, many haven’t. The institution hasn’t won a lot of friends, particularly among local artists. Especially awkward is that some of the things Greaud said were insinuating insults aimed at Smart’s boyfriend, who is the artist Arthur Pena – who has exhibited at the Contemporary. It’s a mess.
I don’t know what I would do if I were Peter Doroshenko. I supposed one approach is to do nothing, to let the art sink or swim on its own merit and let the artist hang himself with his own rope. Just say that everyone is being too sensitive. Art, after all, is never meant to be safe for our sensibilities; that has been one of the main points of the Doroshenko tenure. But this is something different. Silence may be read as insensitivity, implicit condoning, or a lack of spine. Any kind of response could look like the Contemporary is undermining its art and the artists it exhibits. The museum can’t dismiss its exhibition, but now Greaud’s sexism is part of the exhibition.
At its most basic level, Greaud’s exhibit at the Dallas Contemporary is about destruction. His post-exhibition behavior may have wrought the real destruction, though, on the artist’s reputation, and, regrettably, the reputation of the institution that offered him his exhibition.
