Fight at the museum

The Musée d’art contemporain’s new hire
sparks heated differences between some
local artists and the administration

DISAGREEMENTS OVER DIALOGUE: MAC

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

When Marc DeSerres officially appointed long-time chief curator Paulette Gagnon as the Musée d’art contemporain’s new director last month, he likely felt he’d done a fine job and decided it was time for a vacation. So when the president of the museum’s administrative council heard how dozens of high-profile members of Montreal’s artistic community were voicing their disbelief and shock at the institution’s lack of consultation in the hiring process in a letter published earlier this month in Le Devoir, he was, he tells the Mirror, “totally taken by surprise. As a state corporation, we tried to—and did—follow all the rules that were in place. I have nothing to feel badly about.”

Spearheaded by art historians Laurier Lacroix and Anne-Marie Ninacs and signed as of press time by 115 artists, academics, journalists and art professionals, the letter took DeSerres and the museum’s hiring board to task over their supposed lack of transparency and lack of innovation. “The hiring process,” the letter reads, “although legal, is very questionable… since it doesn’t meet the basic criteria for any selection process: transparency, equal chances and thorough consideration of proposals.”

The museum, says Lacroix, “is not living up to its mandate. [The people running it] see it as a space to hang art on the wall. There is no place for reflection and discussion. And that explains the lack of interest on the part of the public. They don’t see themselves in the work.”

Upset as people like Lacroix are, very few of them, he says, take exception to hiring Gagnon personally. “I have no problem with the director herself,” he says. “She’s been at the museum for almost 30 years, she grew up in it, she knows the institution. No one is calling for her head.” What he and the 114 other signatories are complaining about is the alleged lack of openness in the process, and the business-as-usual approach that they feel has not served the museum or contemporary Quebec artists well in the past.

Emmanuel Galland, an artist and communications consultant who has been helping the letter signers get their message out, compares the inner machinations of senior MAC staff and board to an omerta-like Sicilian code of silence, in that there has been a distinct lack of dialogue between the museum and the artistic community. Galland believes the lack of openness means that the museum has become “an ivory tower, an enclave, a fortress…. The museum is not looking outward.”

All this is baffling to DeSerres. He says the administrative council went through all the proper procedures, including hiring a professional headhunting firm to draw up a long list of candidates, on which some 20 names appeared. After interviewing four of them, the selection committee decided on Gagnon. He also points out that Christine St-Pierre, Quebec’s Minister of Culture, supports the council’s decision, which he pointed out in a reply letter to Le Devoir.

He thinks sour grapes may be responsible for at least some of the public sniffiness. “Some people who were not chosen were not happy with the conclusion,” he says. “You can’t please everyone.”

But he does dispute some of the other charges. “We are not distant from the artistic community at all,” he says. “There may be a lack of dialogue between one person in particular and the museum, but not with the artistic community.”