This is the first in a series of four Q&As with art dealers in Seattle about the recent appointment of Jeffrey Deitch, a New York dealer, to the directorship of the most celebrated contemporary art museum in the country, LA MOCA. (Intro here.) The appointment is a big deal because Deitch is so clearly from the business side of the art world, the art market. But aren't museums beholden to the wealthy already? Will this, by being so brazen, actually help museums to make their divisions and standards for being different from commercial galleries clearer? Or is this the last closing of the divide between museums, which are now so financially strapped, and the wealthy patrons that govern and fund them?

Here's Seattle's Greg Kucera, of Greg Kucera Gallery, on the subject. (Billy Howard of Howard House here.) (Highlights: "I'd have to have a lobotomy" and "They've already stepped off the edge; it's too late to pull back.")

What's your first reaction to the news?

I'm no expert in this. Unlike Billy [Howard], I can't say that in my having met Jeffrey Deitch a couple of times I like or dislike him. I don't have an impression of him, really. He's a very clever businessman, he's admirable for the number of different ways he's entered the art market and the art world—professionally, commercially—in just so many spheres of influence. So as MOCA, I think, has been an organization that's been in a certain amount of flux—frankly so has LACMA down there—it doesn't seem incomprehensible to me that they would choose someone like Deitch now to pick up the reins. He's like a chameleon in some ways. I see Billy's referring to him as a basenji: barkless. I wouldn't consider him barkless, by the way. he's just very adept at become whatever someone needs him to be, and in an environment like MOCA, it's really good to have that ability. In a way he reminds me of Patterson Sims, who was at the Seattle Art Museum having previously worked for OK Harris gallery in New York, somebody who is really good at circulating in spheres of influence and just a really good social networker. In the time Patterson was at the museum it became a really social organization.

As a longtime dealer, do you think you'd be qualified to be a museum director?

Oh god, no. Oh, I'd have to have a lobotomy.

I'm too opinionated, I'm too impolitic in how I feel about things and how transparent my feelings about things can be. The conflict of interest part wouldn't be difficult—I mean you sever your ties to art dealing, you've got it made. I don't think you have to sever your ties to collecting, but you can't continue to work. But for someone who's just innately given to opinions and strong feelings about things, and I don't suck up well—I guess I'm not saying that all museum directors suck up, but there's an ability there to make yourself available to people that I probably don't have. And when I think of the loss of autonomy, oh my god, I couldn't stand it.

What, to you, is the meaning of this hire?

Well, Murakami is a perfect example. It's sort of amusing that MOCA took its most grotesque commercial turn with the Murakami show, so to follow that up with the directorship of Deitch doesn't seem so bizarre, really. For people who love Murakami and think Murakami is the next Warhol or the next Rembrandt, why not, it makes sense.

You don't sound like one of those people.

No, I'm not one of those people at all. I don't cotton to Murakami's work in any great way, but I have great admiration for Deitch. I mean, I think he's taken that gallery through a lot of different directions and he's shown a broad range of people. I remember once speaking to him about an Indian artist, Shahzia Sikander, who had a gorgeous little show early in her career at his gallery when it was just a tiny space across from where Jane Hammond's studio is in Soho, and just that he could be as involved with an artist like that and champion, say, her work, and then someone like Murakami—his taste is very diverse. MOCA's a very diverse institution that has to answer to a lot of people and Los Angeles has a culture of personality like no other possible city. I could see a museum in New York, by contrast, taking on someone like Larry Gagosian as a director.

How would you describe the difference between Gagosian and Deitch?

I just think that Deitch is more a slender reed of grass that blows in the wind whichever way it goes, and is able to engage all sorts of different things, where I think Gagosian is probably more inclined to want to be an oak with deep roots putting himself into the power structure, which I think is New York, and a level of intellectual engagement with art. Jeffrey is how old—late 50s?—but he behaves like somebody who's in their late 20s or early 30s. I think Los Angeles has a greater appreciation for that arena of youth culture and engaging artwork on a personality level.

Are there risks in that for MOCA?

I largely think they've already stepped off the edge; it's too late to pull back. They've already done the Murakami show, they've already hired Deitch, it's not like they can pull back from those moves and say, yeah, now we're going to head in a different direction of intellectual engagement in art and art made with the heart soul and mind of an artist being the most important thing.

I mean, what would make [SAM curator] Michael Darling leave MOCA to come here to Seattle? Maybe frame it in that respect. I think Michael Darling is the best thing to happen to Seattle in a long time. And I frankly think [new SAM director] Derrick Cartwright is right up there. Here are two solid individuals with great personalities and the ability to speak to people without a lot of artifice and superficiality between them and whoever they're speaking to. I feel really happy about that, and both of them came out of that out of Southern California—a place where superficiality plays well, and neither of those men is superficial. I don't want to sound like I'm sucking up here...

It sounds like you see this as an L.A. thing. Are museums in general becoming closer to the market or are we just more clearly seeing what was already there?

Museums have always been incredibly dependent on the largesse of incredibly influential and powerful and wealthy people, but we've reached a new threshold there, and this is, I think, because our own government has declined to support those things…

But short of reinventing the infrastructure, what can a museum do to preserve its identity or its desired identity as an independent zone?

Well, maybe that independent zone is an illusion that we're all interested in perpetuating.

And this hire is helpful because it makes us more aware of the desire? Or is that being idealistic? Is there a meaningful link to be made between the Murakami Vuitton shop in the middle of the galleries and the installation of Murakami's dealera leading commercial dealer in the corner office of the museum?

I went to see the Murakami show when I was down there at an art fair … and I loved the show. I thought it was really interesting to see it, and I had a much better appreciation of Murakami having seen it, but it didn't win me over, and the commercial part of it, the Louis Vuitton thing in the middle, where they're basically selling yardage—those Louis Vuitton canvases are basically yardage; it's not that much different than a Thomas Kinkade, where the hand of the artist is several offices away from where the production actually happens—yeah, that fills me with disgust. Whereas I though the WACK!["Art and the Feminist Revolution"] show was a fantastic show.

A WACK-less MOCA: not a good idea.

Both have to be there. I don't think this marks the end of intellectual investigation for Los Angeles or for MOCA, it's just a new turn in the curious progress of Los Angeles as a cultural mecca.

Maybe MOCA should organize a show called We Hired Jeffrey Deitch, about commercialism and museums. Institutional critique.

That would be interesting. I mean, how far can Jeffrey divorce himself from people in Los Angeles that he sold art to? That he curried favor from or who curried favor from him? Who controls what gets shown in a museum, the director, or the curator, or the collectors who put up the money to see this artist or that artist shown?

This draws attention to those questions.

And which artists has Deitch supported? I saw a blog that mentioned his championing an artist like E.V. Day as "visionary." Wow, E.V. Day visionary? Ugh. Whereas Shahzia Sikander, that's a really interesting artist who comes out of a cultural lineage and makes something great out of it.

So the good, the bad, and the ugly: it's all there.