“Just today, four life trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art here wrote a letter to the LA Times distancing themselves from the direction it is taking, and another one — artist John Baldessari — resigned from the board entirely, becoming the fifth board member to do so since February. The proximate cause of the latest storm was the firing of respected curator Paul Schimmel — and not even by MOCA’s new director Jeffrey Deitch, but rather by the man who brought Deitch in, Eli Broad. Broad tried to explain himself in an LA Times op-ed this week…[and] was roundly criticized by, well, pretty much everybody in the art world, with the LAT’s Christopher Knight blithely asserting that “a great art museum whose board of trustees has a combined net worth far in excess of $21 billion shouldn’t have financial problems”, and that none of the moves made by Broad and Deitch were necessary. But the fact is that MOCA has had enormous financial difficulties for many years, that Broad is pretty much the only individual willing to write it large checks, and that therefore he pretty much gets to call the shots.” Source: Felix Salmon, “Eli Broad and the Gagosian Consensus,” Reuters Opinion, July 12, 2012. Read in full at link below: