Graffiti friends and foes have locked horns over the current "Art in the Streets" show at L.A. MOCA,
with fans of street art's rebel energy lining up around the block to
get a glimpse while police wage a campaign to discourage any real street
artists who might be inspired by the show. But now, the L.A. Times's Mike Boehm has opened up a new front on the controversial exhibition, with an article questioning whether one of the show's two associate curators, Roger Gastman,
might have commercial motives that constitute a conflict of interest.
In essence, Boehm asks whether "Art in the Streets" is "Skin Fruit 2.0,"
referring to the 2010 Jeff Koons's-curated show at the New Museum, which will forever be remembered for controversially ceding curatorial power to millionaire collector Dakis Joannou and bringing questions of cui bono into the center of the art-world discussion.

The MOCA situation is as follows: Gastman is indisputably one of the preeminent
experts on street art and graffiti, having, among other things, just
co-authored a "History of American Graffiti" with Caleb Neelon. However, he also has vested commercial interests through his "boutique media agency" R. Rock Enterprises,
which brokers deals between street artists and corporations
looking to be associated with them, offering advertisers a way to
"legitimize your brand and expand your market by reaching out to an
artist's fan base," as its Web site states. None of the artists in the L.A. MOCA show are
currently repped by the company, but four have worked with Gastman in
the past: Retna, Revok, and Saber did a graffiti tour sponsored by Boost Mobile but put together by R. Rock, while Shepard Fairey worked with Gastman on the magazine "Swindle."

While the status granted by curating a blockbuster show undoubtedly will
give Gastman more commercial clout, there don't seem to be any charges
of dirty deeds that go deeper than that. Yet Boehm points out that the American Association of Museum Directors's
guidelines on conflict of interest warn that "good intentions, being
unprovable, are an inadequate defense against later charges of
impropriety" — and all Deitch or Gastman offer are, precisely, testimony
of their good intentions in organizing "Art in the Streets." (Deitch:
"These are people of total integrity, who I trust"; Gastman: "This is
just a huge portfolio piece for myself. I just have to be ethical about
it.")

Deitch, one of the most successful New York art dealers before taking the reins at L.A. MOCA last year and an architect of Citibank's
art advisory service, has been hounded from the beginning by those who
feel that his temperament is too commercial for the museum world. Yet
neither are such questions new, even to L.A. MOCA: In the pre-Deitch
era, the institution faced questions about its decision to include a fully functional Louis Vuitton boutique in its 2007-2008 Takashi Murakami survey.