Deborah Solomon has some fun in Sunday’s New York Times toddling around New York with Jeffrey Deitch as the private dealer can’t resist the urge to get some international publicity. The duo take a trip to visit galleries together:
At 62, Mr. Deitch is a diminutive, wiry man who was dressed in a purple suit and wearing his trademark goggly glasses. We had set out to look at the new fall exhibitions, and moments later were at the Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street in Manhattan, taking in a show of historic abstract paintings by Morris Louis: his so-called “Veils,” their overlapping browns and greens soaked into the canvas like so much glistening lake water.
“If you don’t know what the price is,” Mr. Deitch told me, “it’s probably $3.5 million. Anytime I don’t know what the price of a painting is, it’s $3.5 million.”
Presumably he was joking, except in this case, he happened to be dead-on about the price of the Veils. […] Mr. Deitch says he uses the income he earns as an art adviser to underwrite his great passion, organizing shows of new art, which was very much the mission of his Deitch Projects, now defunct.
Solomon also does a great job of illustrating how Deitch’s most consistent and lasting project has been Deitch himself:
We were still in the car when he showed me a catalog he has just self-published: “The MOCA Index 2010-2013” is a kind of expanded annual report, listing more than 40 exhibitions held at the museum and its ancillary around-town spaces during his tenure.
Leafing through the book, I was surprised to realize how often he had been the curator or co-curator of shows at the museum. That’s not forbidden, but would inevitably have vexed the curators on the staff. It seemed that Mr. Deitch genuinely could not understand why anyone might take offense if he ran the museum as if it were the West Coast branch of his gallery.
Jeffrey Deitch Has Big Plans Now That He’s Left Los Angeles (NYTimes.com)
