Facing the Fallout
All this finger pointing feeds an ugly rift in the museum world. As Mass MoCA plays up its commitment to saying yes to incredibly ambitious installations for the benefit of the public at large, it inevitably paints Buchel as an arrogant, ungracious, and even recalcitrant collaborator, who squandered public funding and then refused to allow visitors at least to learn firsthand about the debacle. The exhibition demonstrates that he failed to partner with the museum and complete the installation as so many other great contemporary artists had done before.

Buchel's work, on the other hand, drags the museum in front of a comparatively small, but internationally influential art world and accuses it of being disingenuous at best when it claims to give artists carte blanche to enact radical projects. Worse, his Basel work implies that now, rather than bearing the cost of removing his unfinished installation, the museum is attempting to litigate the piece into a summer exhibition and profit off gawking crowds.

And yet, though Zaretsky cautions that the legal repercussions of a Mass MoCA victory could have a devastating impact on artists' ability to control their unfinished work in the future, and the dispute has dealt a blow to the museum's 2007 budget, neither party's behavior in the situation seems to have impacted their projects in the long term.

Thompson maintains that Mass MoCA has no plans to begin requiring artists creating work for Building 5 to provide detailed, budgeted proposals prior to beginning work on large-scale projects. And other art institutions have hardly shied away from Buchel. In the spring of 2008, he will construct a large installation at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, a work that was initially slated for 2007 but was bumped back to clear space in his schedule for the Mass MoCA project. And the artist displayed a more noteworthy work in Basel—an installation called Unplugged (Simply Botiful) that contained a bar, shipping container, and dumpster—which has been placed on hold for a private museum in Europe.

And according to Hauser & Wirth, there is another buyer waiting in the wings should the deal fall through.

Editor's note: The original version of this story contained some inaccuracies and misleading statements. One of Christoph Buchel's works on view in Basel, Switzerland, in June was incorrectly referred to as Simply Botiful; the correct title is Unplugged (Simply Botiful). Joseph Thompson's letter to the artist on March 28 detailed conditions under which the exhibition "Training Ground for Democracy" could be completed, canceled, or opened to the public in an unfinished state; the letter did not directly cancel the exhibition. The original version of the article also stated that the artist did not respond to this letter until early May; ARTINFO has now learned that there was some contact between him and the museum during that time. Finally, the story implied that a cinder-block wall was not part of the artist's original plan for the project, but according to Buchel's New York gallery it was included in the initial proposal that he gave the museum.