Weekend Words: Ditch
It was only a matter of time before MOCA ditched Deitch.
The soap opera known as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art continues to unfold, with recent revelations that Steven Cohen, one of LA MOCA’s biggest financial backers, is under investigation by the Feds for trading on insider information, followed by the news that the museum’s beleaguered director, Jeffrey Deitch, is on his way out.
According to an anonymous source quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Deitch was “choosing to step down,” but anyone familiar with his controversial three-year tenure, which included the forced resignation of esteemed curator Paul Schimmel and the departure of all four artist members of the museum’s board, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, it was only a matter of time before MOCA ditched Deitch.
“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”
—Booker T. Washington
“I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.”
—Charles Dickens, Hard Times
“I’d rather dig a ditch than go to a dinner party with people I don’t know.”
—Marian Keyes
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into a ditch.”
—Gospel According to Matthew
“Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That’s my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.”
—Samuel Beckett, Molloy
“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”
—Calvin Coolidge
“Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.”
—Marshall McLuhan
