Jonathan Abbott, the former WGBH executive responsible for importing the most soothing of British television, has been named the Museum of Contemporary Art’s sixth director in 18 years, signaling the troubled institution’s desperate pivot from avant-garde volatility to the heavily medicated rhythms of a Sunday reset.
The appointment of a public broadcasting functionary to helm Los Angeles's premiere contemporary art space is not merely an administrative surrender; it is a profound ontological retreat. The museum, having exhausted itself in a nearly two-decade performance of unchoreographed institutional churn, has apparently decided that its next act of self-immolation will be conducted in an English drawing room, over a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey, substituting the genuine peril of contemporary expression for the digestible comforts of public television.
We realized that if we are going to hemorrhage directors at a historically unprecedented rate, we must at least make the aesthetics of their departure as beautifully lit and emotionally repressed as possible.
Abbott’s pedigree suggests a curation of polite inevitability, leading one to imagine the museum's upcoming retrospectives will abandon the confrontational postmodernism of the last decade for something infinitely more manageable; perhaps a quiet exhibition of decorative teapots interrupted by a scandal involving a local vicar. It is a desperately bourgeois capitulation, a cowardly soft launch of the museum's own irrelevance that mirrors the tragic arc of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, echoes the suffocating structuralist despair of Hollis Frampton’s 1970 avant-garde film Zorns Lemma, and somehow perfectly replicates the narrative trajectory of the 2004 Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks.
The Los Angeles cultural elite, long weary of the institution's relentless administrative chaos, has reportedly welcomed the transition to a more heavily scripted decline. By Tuesday morning, the MOCA board of trustees was already in early pre-production for Abbott’s eventual, highly publicized departure, ensuring the natural lighting will perfectly capture the wistful, unspoken longing of a man realizing he should have simply stayed in Boston.