Jeffrey Deitch Takes Hollywood
A Film by Alison Chernick
An Exclusive Tour of the Art Guru's New Los Angeles Home
After being appointed the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) this January, former New York dealer and downtown impresario Jeffrey Deitch needed some digs on the West Coast. Seasoned aesthete that he is, to truly feel at home he needed to surround himself with the art he loves (click play above for a sneak peek of the pieces by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Aaron Young and Andy Warhol, among many others). Deitch's new "movie star" home, in LA's Los Feliz neighborhood, isn't just any old Spanish revival house-it's the former residence of Cary Grant. (Meanwhile, another prominent figure in the art world is buying into Hollywood history: Larry Gagosian recently purchased Gary Cooper's old abode, in Holmby Hills.) Deitch is particularly interested in where art and entertainment merge. As part of his early activities at MOCA, he allowed his friend James Franco to film an episode of General Hospital within the museum; and the first show under his leadership was a major Dennis Hopper retrospective. For today's short, filmmaker Alison Chernick and food artist Jennifer Rubell toured Deitch's house including his "super Tudor-pop" party room, as he calls it-and sounded out his theories on celebrity, his new vision for MOCA, and his belief that you need a painting of Jesus over your bed. – For Nowness.