The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art saw a drop in attendance in 2012.

The Art Newspaper has released its closely read annual worldwide museum attendance figures for 2012 and while there is good news for New York, there is some rather bad news for Los Angeles's embattled Museum of Contemporary Art.

The most popular exhibition globally in 2012 was one of Dutch Old Masters that opened in Japan, something the paper points to as evidence that while new art may steal the spotlight, old art still draws crowds. In the major cities, however, modern and contemporary art stayed on top.

In terms of the most popular exhibitions worldwide, a U.S. museum, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., came fourth, behind institutions in Tokyo, Brasil and Russia, with the exhibition "Colorful Realm: Ito Jakuchu," which saw 7,611 visitors per day. The next U.S. museum on that list is MoMA, at 13th, with its Willem de Kooning retrospective, which saw 6,218 per day, for a total of a whopping 696,362. (MoMA's number is more impressive than the National Gallery's when you factor in that the National Gallery is free of charge, and MoMA charges over $20 admission.) In last year's survey, which measured attendance in 2011, a New York institution, the Met, made fourth place, with its blockbuster exhibition of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, which saw 8,025 per day.

But in terms of overall museum attendance, the Met remained in its number two spot worldwide, behind the Louvre, with 6.1 million visitors (versus the Louvre's 9.7 million). The National Gallery came in fifth, at a total of 5.2 million. The Met saw a slight boost in 2012 (6.11 million, up from 6.004 million in 2011) from its newly refurbished Islamic and American art galleries.

As for the top 10 most popular exhibitions in New York, perhaps not surprisingly, MoMA occupies a full seven of those slots, and grabbed the top five, with De Kooning (6,218), Cindy Sherman (5,660),  "Print/Out: Multiplied Art in the Information Era," (5,454), Sanja Ivekovic (5,045) and "Century of the Child: Growing by Design" (4,624). In sixth place is the Guggenheim with its Maurizio Cattelan retrospective (4,415).

For those keeping score, solo shows of women artists did well in 2012. The survey points to MoMA's exhibition of Cindy Sherman, which saw 5,700 visitors a day. A less famous artist showing at MoMA, Sanja Ivekovic, did almost as well at 5,045 per day. Meanwhile, up at the Guggenheim, the retrospective of late photographer Francesca Woodman drew 3,501 per day.

The paper’s 2012 attendance survey is especially interesting where Los Angeles institutions are concerned. MoCA’s troubles in 2012, including the widely criticized parting of ways with longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel (resulting in the loss of all four artist trustees) were accompanied by a dip in attendance. Overall attendance was 248,615, down almost half from the previous year, and the best-attended exhibition—according to the Art Newspaper’s methodology, which ranks exhibitions by average daily attendance—was the two week long “Transmission LA:AV Club,” a festival-type event that featured a curator, Mike D., from the band the Beastie Boys. (Due to its short run, “Transmission LA:AV Club” had a high daily average of 2,055. Its total attendance was 30,239. "MOCA Permanent Collection Masterworks 1945-1975,” which ran for 174 days, and “Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder,” which ran from April to September, both saw far higher total visitors, with the latter show bringing in a total of 65,000, and its opening, the Cai Guo-Qiang Mystery Circle event, drawing 4,500 visitors in one day, the most visitors to a single event at the museum in 2012. Because those exhibitions’ average visitor numbers were lower—459 and 609, respectively—they did not make the paper’s list of most popular exhibitions worldwide, which, for reasons of limited space, cuts off at a daily average of 633.) 2011 saw 402,255 total visitors for the museum, a figure that was greatly helped along by director Jeffrey Deitch’s popular “Art in the Streets” exhibition. MoCA is now closer to its 2010 figure of 236,104. Happily it is not quite back to the dismal year of 2009, when the museum was in the midst of a financial crisis and saw just 148,616 visitors.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), meanwhile, is seeing a general upward trend in its visitor numbers. In 2012, total attendance was just under 1.17 million. In 2010, the museum saw just 914,356 visitors, and in 2009 it had only 695,545. The surprising thing for LACMA in 2012, however, is that the museum was down slightly from last year's figure of 1.28 million—surprising because the museum had its Pacific Standard Time exhibitions and a monumental Michael Heizer piece that was installed on the premises, accompanied by much attention in the press. "We were a bit surprised by that," said Javier Pes, deputy editor of The Art Newspaper. "That was Pacific Standard Time and Michael Heizer combined."

Another overall attendance success story in L.A. is the Hammer Museum, which saw 214,500 visitors in 2012, up from 203,000 in 2011. In 2008, 150,000 people came through the doors. Its upward trajectory, Mr. Pes pointed out, is as impressive as LACMA's.

Clarification: March 29, 2013: The following parenthetical clarification has been added regarding attendance of specific exhibitions at MoCA Los Angeles: (Due to its short run, “Transmission LA:AV Club” had a high daily average of 2,055. Its total attendance was 30,239. "MOCA Permanent Collection Masterworks 1945-1975,” which ran for 174 days, and “Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder,” which ran from April to September, both saw far higher total visitors, with the latter show bringing in a total of 65,000, and its opening, the Cai Guo-Qiang Mystery Circle event, drawing 4,500 visitors in one day, the most visitors to a single event at the museum in 2012. Because those exhibitions’ average visitor numbers were lower—459 and 609, respectively—they did not make the paper’s list of most popular exhibitions worldwide, which, for reasons of limited space, cuts off at a daily average of 633.)

Ruscha. (Courtesy edruscha.com)

Following the lead of John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger, artist Ed Ruscha has resigned from the board of trustees at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This means that there are currently no artists sitting on the museum's board.

Mr. Baldessari was the first to exit last week, citing not only the resignation (or perhaps firing) of beloved chief-curator Paul Schimmel, but also the forthcoming disco show at the museum as a major reason for leaving. He was followed by Ms. Opie and Ms. Kruger.

The news about Mr. Ruscha comes from a comment left by his wife on the Facebook page of Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight in response to an article Mr. Knight wrote about the loss of three of the four artist trustees: "‎Christopher Knight, Ed has resigned. i guess they haven't announced it yet." The Times confirmed this with the museum Monday morning. Calls placed by us to Mr. Ruscha's studio Monday afternoon were not answered.

Update, 5 p.m.: The Times has obtained Mr. Ruscha's resignation letter, which reads in part: "My defection may look obvious, but it will be all the better for the museum, which is on a course different than I imagined, but one I hope to support in the future."

Visitors look at Gustav Klimt's painting "Der Kuss" (The Kiss), 2009. (Courtesy Dieter Nagl/AFP/Getty Images)

Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie followed John Baldessari in resigning from the board of MOCA L.A. Here's their letter. [L.A. Times]

An early fresco by the artist Gustav Klimt, thought to be lost for good, was allegedly found by a man in his garage in Northern Austria, just as Austria is celebrating the painter's 150th birthday. Experts say the fresco is most likely by Klimt's brother Ernst. [The Guardian]

Art historian W. J. T. Mitchell expounds on the word "occupy." [Documenta 13]

Chicago collector Stefan Edlis, who made his money in plastics, talks about his collection. He owns six works by Maurizio Cattelan. He says, " Is Cattelan a jokester? Is he a fraud? I like asking those questions." [WSJ]

Shepard Fairey mural is at the heart of a lawsuit. [L.A. Times]

MCA Chicago curator Naomi Beckwith shares her 20 favorite things, from kumquats to a trip to Antarctica. [ChicagoMag]

Author Larry McMurty to auction off 300,000 books. [WSJ]

The Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum, a new contemporary art museum at Mr. Broad's alma mater Michigan State University, has set a date for opening: Nov. 9. [L.A. Times]

Michael Kimmelman talks about Hugh Hardy's Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. [NYT]

Geoff Dyer on how Google Street View is inspiring new photography. [The Guardian]

Baldessari at the 2011 MOCA gala. (Courtesy Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Artist John Baldessari has told the Los Angeles Times that he is stepping down from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In an interview with the paper he said that "to live with my conscience I just had to do it.”

Late last month, MOCA's chief curator, Paul Schimmel, departed the museum. The Times has reported that the board forced him out. At the time, Mr. Baldessari described Mr. Schimmel as "a major curator—the breadth and depth of the shows were always amazing, and very important in the art world." Mr. Baldessari joined the museum's board in 2000.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (Courtesy tbSMITH/Flickr)

Just when things appeared to have calmed down at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, following the much-debated departure of chief curator Paul Schimmel late last month, four of the museum's lifetime trustees have penned a letter to the Los Angeles Times that takes issue with the positions staked out by Eli Broad, another lifetime trustee, in a separate letter recently published in the paper.

The four trustees—Lenore S. Greenberg, Betye Burton, Audrey Irmas and Frederick M. Nicholas—open their letter as follows: "Like Eli Broad, we are life trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, but we have a different version of the museum's history and, more important, a different vision of its future."

While acknowledging that the museum has, in the past, overspent its budget, hurting its financial standing, the letter argues that the "celebrity-driven program that MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch promotes is not the answer."

In his letter, published this past weekend, Mr. Broad maintained that, in today's economic environment, "museums must be fiscally prudent and creative in presenting cost-effective, visually stimulating exhibitions that attract a broad audience."

Read the trustees' full letter here.

Schimmel in 2011. (Courtesy Stefanie Keenan/WireImage)

With a whopping 130 artists and more than 500 artworks, "Under the Big Black Sun," the exhibition about California art from 1974 to 1981 that former Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles chief curator Paul Schimmel organized last fall, seems likely to be remembered as his swan song at the museum. (He departed last week, though he is completing work on "Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962," which opens in September.)

Just a few days before splitting with MOCA, where he’d been a curator for 22 years, Mr. Schimmel was at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., to participate in one of many panel discussions held during a weekend conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the school's Center for Curatorial Studies. The discussion in which Mr. Schimmel took part was titled “Case Studies,” and invited curator panelists to explain how they go about assembling shows. Listening to him talk about and show slides from "Under the Big Black Sun," which opened last October as part of the Getty's "Pacific Standard Time" initiative and ran through Feb. 13, provided a window into his curating process.

Mr. Schimmel began by telling the audience at Bard that he began thinking about the show well before it was commissioned by the Getty for "PST." “I’d been noodling around with this idea,” he said, “at one point trying to do it collaboratively with [the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art].” That idea was to look at California art during 1970s pluralism, or, as he explained it, “the foundations of postmodernism, a non-hierarchical approach to both materials and critical thinking coming out of the universities.”

But no exhibition ever conforms to the shape of the first thoughts that generate it. “I’m sure this is true of all curators," he said. "You start with one idea, and it begins to evolve and move into something else.” Pluralism proved a tough topic to wrap his head around. “It was almost by the nature of what I was looking at that I went off in so many directions simultaneously,” he said. “Even as big and generous as the MOCA Geffen facility is, with close to 50,000 square feet, the show was getting very unwieldy.” And so it evolved. “It was maybe out of a sense of necessity, of starting to rein it in, that I got backed into doing a show that, at least for me, had far more political work than I’d imagined it would.” This political content, he said, started to cohere around “the sense that artists themselves [at the time]—not collectively, not as part of an organization or group, but as individuals—could make a difference. In political change, a kind of activist stance.”

Once he started to hone his idea, he was faced with a dilemma that inevitably confronts curators of big historical surveys: where to start, chronologically speaking, and where to end. “It was kind of a gift, being in California, that Nixon got thrown out of office in 1974 and Reagan, some six years later, became a new kind of monarchy,” he said. “Those seemed like good bookends.”

The show opened with the document in which Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. “I’m not subtle,” Mr. Schimmel said, laughing. “It was the first thing you saw when you walked in.” Nixon’s getting thrown out, although it was “what everyone I knew was going for” was, he said, “remarkably unsatisfying, and not the least of that was due to this one extraordinary document….You read this document, and you go, ‘Whoa, free pass! You don’t have to be responsible!’ I think this infuriated people. We’ve done all this to end up with this moral and intellectual collapse? That became the foundation for the exhibition, with its title from the L.A. punk group X that represents that dystopia of California but also that sense of rage that constituted the punk generation of artists.”

It wasn’t the only historical document in Mr. Schimmel’s show. He called up the National Archives, and got Nixon’s resignation letter. “That is the great thing about museum work: if you ask the National Archives and you tell them exactly what it is you’re doing—and I was completely clear in terms of the context—there is someone there who will say, ‘This is interesting. This is what our historical documents are for. We’ll lend it to you.’” The letter, addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, reads, “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” Mr. Kissinger wrote on it in blue pen, "11.35 AM HK.” “That short little document was the game changer,” Mr. Schimmel said. “That’s history.”

Mr. Schimmel spoke at some length about several of the artworks in his show—by Bruce Conner, Llyn Foulkes, Eleanor Antin, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley and Karen Finley—including a few that he managed to bring back to light. “Shows like this give you an opportunity to dig up things that people had long forgotten but that had an enormous impact,” he said, and showed a slide of Robert Arneson’s sculptural portrait of assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone.  (The famous “Twinkie Defense” is alluded to on the sculpture’s base.) It was acquired by SF MoMA in May, but when Mr. Schimmel put it on display at MOCA, it hadn’t been seen since it was shown part at the inauguration of the city's Moscone Center in 1981.

He also spoke about an artwork from that show that, he said, “I’m sorry MOCA has not purchased.” Three Weeks in May (1977) by Suzanne Lacy depicts, with red dots overlaying a map of L.A., where rapes occurred during a three-week period in May 1977, showing which cases were pursued by the police and which were not. “It was a powerful statement from one of the leading feminist artists,” he said, “but it was really also a piece of information...that provided people with an opportunity to understand how direct and explicit art can be in a political context.”

Mr. Schimmel concluded his talk with some of the show's works that related directly to the punk scene in L.A., like the zines that Raymond Pettibon was making at the time when he was better known as the brother of the guitarist for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. In conjunction with “Under the Big Black Sun,” Mr. Schimmel had the bands X, the Dead Kennedys and the Avengers perform. “The Getty sponsored a punk concert at MoCA," he said. "I thought, my God, if John Paul Getty, with his fascination with Roman and Greek antiquities and European decorative arts, had only known that, even by putting itself on the hill, the Getty could not somehow remain unscathed, untouched by Los Angeles and its culture.”

Schimmel. (Courtesy PMC)

Update 2:20 p.m.
We've just received a statement from MOCA Board Co-Chair David G. Johnson on the matter of the departure of longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel.

The statement reads in full:

"Paul Schimmel is stepping down as MOCA's chief curator. It is amicable and there will be a press release tomorrow."

Update 12:40 p.m. 

The LA Times now reports that Mr. Schimmel has been "fired."

Mat Gleason says he obtained the story from "several high-placed sources at the museum," who described Mr. Schimmel's reported downsizing as part of a "bloodbath" that included the firing of at least three other people in various departments of the museum. In his understanding, the firings came in the wake of an end-of-fiscal-year budget meeting on Tuesday.

Original post

Paul Schimmel, the long-serving chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, appears to be parting ways with the museum. The news was first reported late last night by Los Angeles-based art writer Mat Gleason on his Coagula blog. Mr. Schimmel and the museum were not immediately available for comment, but an informed source has confirmed the move.

One of the nation's most respected curators of contemporary art, Mr. Schimmel was famed for his gigantic, exhaustive group surveys on extremely recent contemporary art, like the 1992 show "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s."

The reasons for Mr. Schimmel's departure remain unclear. Mr. Gleason's blog post would seem to indicate that he was let go. MOCA has struggled with financial issues in recent years as it fights to regrow its endowment, which shrank as it ran deficits and its investments were battered because of economic turmoil. Director Jeffrey Deitch and Mr. Schimmel have also been said to have had an acrimonious relationship.

We'll have updates as the story develops.

Ms. Leibovitz. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles has named photographer Annie Leibovitz as the recepient of its 7th Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, which has gone in past years to the likes of Yoko Ono, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Tina Brown.

In other news involving Ms. Leibovitz, who shows with the Danziger Gallery in New York, there are just three more days to catch her work in "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," at the Brooklyn Museum. The last day of that show is Sunday.

Steve Cohen. (Patrick McMullan Company)

The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles announced moments ago that Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund-operating collector from Greenwich, Conn., who is known to have a penchant for plowing a good bit of cash into art, has just joined its board of trustees.

Count that as a big win for MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who had been charged with bringing in the big money when he began in his position in 2010.

In a news release, MOCA noted that the board has welcome the likes of Greenwich, Conn., collector Peter M. Brant, Ukrainian billionaire Victor and artist Catherine Opie in recent years.

Remember that time that Mr. Cohen reportedly excused himself from dinner at his house with Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry, Eli Broad and Leon Black, among others, to buy a Warhol Coke painting for $35.4 million by telephone from Sotheby's, and then came back and told everyone about it? That was pretty great.

This was 2009, around the time when the term “performance art” really started to become bastardized: every time a celebrity made a bad career move it was easily forgiven—“That dress made of raw meat? That was just performance art,” or whatever. This has gotten so out of control, that The Wall Street Journal recently called Kim Kardashian’s divorce debacle a kind of advancement of performance art for the 21st century, a revision and update of Warholian celebrity at a time when becoming a celebrity has never been easier (and never been more superficial).

Last week, Yvonne Rainer accused Ms. Abramovic’s plans for the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles gala—which included performers cramped underneath dinner tables, their heads poking out of holes and staring at the attendees like a big turkey served up on a silver platter—of being exploitative.

Ms. Rainer wrote a venomous open letter, co-signed by a number of artists and writers to MoCA's director Jeffrey Deitch, and did not back down from her feelings about the gala after watching a rehearsal. Images from the event, which happened over the weekend, just arrived in our inbox. Take a look for yourself.

Debbie Harry appears to be cutting apart a naked Debbie Harry cake and serving it up to the crowd. Whether you find this legitimate or not depends on how you define performance art. All we’ll say is that staring at a head poking through a table that looks as if it’s been removed from its body is not really how we like to enjoy our supper.