Gary Cypres, a Los Angeles businessman who was brought in to advise moca after the 2008 crisis, and who would head the board’s finance committee until March 2012, also had reservations: “I had no problem with Jeffrey’s knowledge of contemporary art or his success as a gallery owner, but I thought he might not be the appropriate fund-raiser. Charles Young had stabilized everything, and moca needed stability and time to rebuild. But Eli and the powers that be decided to take a risk. They made a controversial choice—certainly to the art world—and that created another issue that they really didn’t need. They rolled the dice, and instead of stability, they got more instability.”

After closing his business in New York, Deitch took up his position at moca in June 2010. His first show, a Dennis Hopper retrospective, opened on July 11. Although Hopper was best known as the director and star of Easy Rider, his photographs had been exhibited in museums in Europe. The retrospective, however, also included the paintings and sculptures he had been making since the early 1960s, and it took up the entire 55,000-square-foot Geffen building. Hopper died six weeks before the opening, and the show did not go over well with the natives. “Hopper’s work as a photographer and a painter and all of that stuff was virtually unknown in New York,” complains Christopher Knight, “so when Jeffrey came to L.A., he thought this was going to be a great big revelation to everyone. Well, that stuff has been kicking around here for years! I think it was a very provincial move on the part of the new director of a museum that has an international reputation.”

Paul Schimmel would have nothing to do with a Hopper show, so Deitch enlisted Hopper’s good friend Julian Schnabel, the New York painter, to install it. “That was the first indication that traditional curatorial rigor was not going to be a feature of what moca was going to do going forward,” says Knight. Deitch’s decision to allow the young actor James Franco, who was in town for an episode of General Hospital, to stage a “Soap at moca” night that summer only fed the argument that the museum’s new director was mistaking Los Angeles for Hollywood.

Compounding the problem, Deitch attempted to postpone a long-planned retrospective of the work of Jack Goldstein, a multi-media artist highly regarded in Los Angeles, who had committed suicide in 2003. Senior curator Philipp Kaiser, who was responsible for the show, left moca to become director of the Ludwig Museum, in Cologne, and the retrospective was promptly picked up by the Orange County Museum of Art. Deitch’s critics claim that he was uncommunicative with Schimmel and the other curators. His defenders say it was the other way around.

Irving Blum, the dean of Los Angeles art dealers, told me, “Jeffrey had a tough start due largely to the poisonous personality of Schimmel, who really put him down at every opportunity. The guy’s a brilliant curator but, finally, too divisive. I think a big mistake that Jeffrey made was not getting rid of Schimmel right at the start.” (Paul Schimmel declined to comment.)

Catherine Opie feels differently: “The curators were telling me that, all of a sudden, 70 percent of the curatorial side was going to be run by Jeffrey. That’s a huge problem. You’ve got people there who have invested years and years of scholarly research for their next shows. And that needed to be honored.”

Yet, the museum’s biggest success in terms of attendance since Deitch’s appointment was his own “Art in the Streets,” a comprehensive survey of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the present. Featuring 50 artists, it attracted a record-breaking 201,352 visitors during its four-month run at the Geffen Contemporary. The artist known as Retna recalls introducing Deitch to his fellow taggers: “Jeffrey was real open, and a lot of times you don’t get that from other curators or directors. He was hanging out in the hood with some of the street guys, and he didn’t seem to discriminate on where he would go, which was kind of cool.”