«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

The obvious, already-engaged debate about "Art in the Streets," the show that L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art bills as "the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art," is whether the genre deserves to be certified as museum-quality or decried as vandalism. But look beneath that surface, and the show at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary also poses questions that have roiled the museum world for the better part of a decade. In planning and executing an exhibition, when is it OK for a nonprofit art museum to forge ties with a profit-seeking art entrepreneur?Roger Gastman, hired as the show's associate curator, has both ironclad credentials as a historian of street art and a clear commercial interest in it via R. Rock Enterprises, a marketing company he has run for years. Dubbed R. Rock's "dictator" on his business card, Gastman sells his services — and those of an array of artists with whom he has close connections — to advertisers interested in generating buzz and sales by hitching their products to the street-art phenomenon.

-Los Angeles Times
April 28 2011