One of the great things about having a blog is that when you’re out and about in public and something relevant to your blog is frustrating, demeaning, insulting, etc…, you can say “Well I’m going to go home and write about this on my blog!” Maybe someone will hear my tiny little cry of discontent and things will change. Maybe a chorus of voices will come together and say “WTF?” On to my complaint/whine.
Everyone complained about the conduct of MOCA’s hired security staff during the Grand Avenue Festival, and no one was happy with their behavior during the © Murakami member’s reception. The conduct and complete disregard for the viewer experience that nearly everyone I know experienced during those events was staggering, and conversation dominating. Those are big events where security staff has lots to to, where there are oddball folks wandering about, so I have some small sympathy for them as they go about their jobs. Before the © Murakami opening, I never really had any real personal reason to complain about MOCA’s security/docent staff. Now I sure do.
At the © Murakami opening, Myself and a dozen other folks were yelled at, to “get up against the wall!” several times, while waiting to get into the Vuitton store/booth/not really a strong enough gesture to warrant Christopher Knight’s Duchampian reference, but more about that later. It wasn’t really that big of a deal - I’m sure it had been a long night, and my skin is too thick to let the freaked-out behavior of some poorly trained and probably underpaid security guard ruin my evening. But yesterday was the last straw.
Yesterday, I made a trip to see the show again, with members of the El Camino College IDEAS Club. It ended up being a small group as people had schedule problems and some were super late, but my “What is going on with MOCA’s security contractor” alarms went off in force yesterday. After being told once, casually by a nice member of the security staff to stay 18″ away from a painting (I’m used to being in almost direct contact with artifacts, and I pay a lot of attention to surface detail and technique, so I like to get close to stuff, but I also forget that the docents in dozens of American museums haven’t been given a handout telling them that I know what I’m doing and am not going to touch anything.), I wasn’t really bothered, but I kept hearing security staff say to other people “18 inches.” The real problem came later.
After ascending upstairs to the “Louis Vuitton Lobby / Murakami’s new an more interesting work afterthought”, we were still talking at length about the process of his work - mainly what’s done freehand, what’s done with either tape or a stencil and on the more recent works, what’s done with adhesive vinyl. That requires getting close, and again the lone security guy keeping the riff-raff in line approached me saying “18 inches, 18 inches, sir.” After backing away from the painting, he proceeded to try to talk to me in what became an increasingly weird and circular conversation. After telling me, a third time (I’m now standing about four feet from the piece, and surrounded by Michele, Karen Whitney and her new baby Sam, he starts asking me if I understand what he’s saying. I’m now dumbfounded, thinking to myself, “is this jackass asking me if I’m capable of understanding basic sentences in English, or the concept of distance?” After answering “Yes.” He proceeds to repeat himself twice, while staring me in the eyes with the puzzled face of a child, not moving for almost a minute. After asking me one last time, I was able to make him slip out of his mental fog by telling him that “This isn’t something that we need to have a long conversation about.” After which he proceeded to retreat to some other area of the space.
After that strange little encounter, I heard him harassing nearly a dozen other people in the space, asking one woman to remove her chewing gum and letting nearly everyone else know to keep 18″ from the artwork, returning to ask Karen to remove her chewing gum, etc… The guy was on a rampage. You could hear other groups of people murmuring “what’s up with this guy?” It had crossed a line - my experience was being degraded, and substantially. Not only was my group derailed during our conversation (an interesting one, between an art history major, a professor and a curator), but this single employee was putting a blanket of paranoia and irritation over the whole space. All it takes is one turd in the punch bowl to ruin things for everyone, and this guy was the turd.
So I guess this forces me to ask the question - why does MOCA continue to hire these guys? No one likes them, they’re not very good at their job and they could probably easily be replaced. They’re doing a job that would be great for art students and semi-retired art lovers. Would you rather work an $8 per hour job working at MOCA, or would you rather flip burgers while going through art school. These guys are absolutely the wrong crew to either mediate the viewer experience, or to protect the art. Right now all they’re doing is making MOCA look foolish and uninterested in the viewer experience past getting their ticket money at the door.
Let’s face it - it’s pretty much impossible to protect art in a museum. Nearly any visitor could deploy some kind of cutting device and within seconds destroy pretty much any painted work they’d like, and a decent sized hammer would fit well within most museums’ bag size policies. We’re operating on trust here, already, and that’s not going to change. And what’s up with the 18″ rule? If this is such a big deal, then get out some tape and paint some little white boxes on the floor around every single object. Either trust us not to fall into or touch your paintings, educate the visitor better about the rules, before they’re into their museum experience, or better yet, equip each visitor with a belt that shocks them if they get too close to the wall, like one of those “invisible fences” for dogs and farm animals, since that’s what they’re pretty much treating the visitor as at this point.
Technorati Tags: MOCA, © Murakami, Takashi Murakami, security, museum, museum security
