As [Los Angeles Times‘s] Culture Monster reported Saturday, artists Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger have resigned from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Here is the resignation letter they emailed on Friday to museum director Jeffrey Deitch and board co-chairs Maria Bell and David Johnson:”We want the best for MOCA. We want it to remain the globally respected institution it has become. We want it to continue its intellectually ambitious and visually compelling exhibition program. We have voiced these concerns at meeting after meeting. Perhaps we have been heard. Perhaps we’ve been heard but hardly heeded.Museums display the preferences of their leadership. Leaderships change. Things change. We’ve stuck around because MOCA is important to us. We had hoped that our stake in MOCA’s history and our hopes for its future were evident to the Board of Trustees and the various powers that be.But this is not about a particular cast of characters, about good actors and bad. It’s a reflection of the crisis in cultural funding. It’s about the role of museums in a culture where visual art is marginalized except for the buzz around secondary market sales, it’s about the not so subtle recalibration of the meaning of “philanthropy,” and it’s about the morphing of the so-called “art world” into the only speculative bubble still left floating (for the next 20 minutes). Can important and serious exhibitions receive funding without a donor having a horse in the race? Is attendance a sustaining revenue stream for museums? Has it ever been? These are questions we have been asking.”(Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2012.)