Mass MoCA's Mess

The storm surrounding Christoph Büchel's aborted installation for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is set to come to a head on Friday, when the artist and the museum make their respective cases in court. (Büchel's lawyer is none other than Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog.)

The dispute concerns a colossal installation that Mass MoCA commissioned Büchel to create for display beginning last December. But the exhibition, titled "Training Ground for Democracy" never opened, with the museum accusing the artist of diva-like demands that catapulted its budget well over the initial estimate of $160,000 — around twice that amount, in fact. The artist claims that the museum was responsible for the many thousands of dollars worth of additional costs and that, in any case, it didn't have a contract with him that specified a budget.

This was a sticky enough situation made worse when Mass MoCA began allowing visitors to walk past the unfinished installation surrounded by tarp-covered fences and asked a court to allow it to remove the partitions and officially exhibit the spectacle. In addition, it mounted "Made at Mass MoCA," featuring photographs of other installations at the museum, newspaper clippings about "Training Ground," and lists drawn up in relation to Büchel's piece. Büchel fought back, invoking the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 and requesting that the museum be forced to remove the remnants of his work from its large gallery. (The museum says that VARA only applies to completed artworks, which "Training Ground" is not.)

Mass MoCA has been crucified by art critics from the Boston Globe's Ken Johnson, who called its actions "sad, dumb, and shameful," to the New York Times' Roberta Smith, who wrote, "When a museum behaves badly, it's never pretty. But few examples top the depressing spectacle at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art." Lee Rosenbaum makes the point that even if the museum comes out the legal victor, it'll still be a damaged public institution because it's been cast as childishly trying to sully Büchel's reputation. What artist will want to work with a museum with a reputation for open hostility towards those it commissions?

On whichever side the blame ought to fall, what's certain is that there was, at some point, a massive miscommunication between museum and artist.