Somebody's Getting Hiiii-iiired

Dia tapped Jeffrey Weiss, modern and contemporary curator at the National Gallery of Art since 1994, to be the Beacon-based institution's guiding light. It's like when actors marry after meeting on the set of a romcom: Dia and the National Gallery of Art brought together "Dan Flavin: A Retrospective", an enormously successful show that's traveled to seven cities.

Los Angeles, the city that will host the Flavin retrospective next, is also smiling. Nearly a year ago, director Michael Govan left Dia for Lacma:*

How's LACMA's new guy doing? Govan, formerly director of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation and a specialist in contemporary art, took charge of LACMA in April and wasted no time. He put his stamp on the museum's expansion plan by moving a store and cafe aside to give art a larger presence in the entry pavilion, grabbed a chance to rescue a historic modernist office designed by architect John Lautner and install it in the Streamline Moderne building known as LACMA West, persuaded high-profile figures to join the museum's board of trustees and helped enlist artist John Baldessari to design the imaginative installation of "Magritte and Contemporary Art."

Lacma's happy, all right.

But it's not all laugh tracks and wedding bells! Any number of people have voiced objections to Dia's decisionmaking in Manhattan, among them, Jerry Saltz:

[In 2006] the institutional variety of that "power structure" veered from thrilling to clueless to criminal. Starting with the criminal—instead of renovating its tremendous 22nd Street Chelsea headquarters, establishing another building, or just opening a temporary New York space, the Dia Center for the Arts abandoned Manhattan by shutting down all of its rotating exhibition spaces in the city. It is mind-boggling and heartbreaking that not one of the trustees or the ex-director (who in a very Bush-like move abandoned the institution after he shut it down) resigned over or openly protested this irresponsible action.

Dia currently has no space (and no known prospects for a space: The Whitney seized on the Chelsea High Line property, which will be designed by Renzo Piano, whom the Whitney brought on for the now-abandoned plan to expand along Madison Ave).

When Weiss moves in with Dia, presumably he'll want to do the thing that the Dia should have done from the moment it moved out of its Chelsea pad: move back in. Dia's ex was crazy to leave!

Now, of course, we have a hole in our hearts here in the District. (And a tired metaphor.) Who will the NGA hire?

* It's handy as far as acronyms go, but in all caps, LACMA looks stern. How much more approachable is Lacma? Isn't Nafta friendly?

Posted by Kriston at February 21, 2007 4:33 PM