[Frameworks] Sally Berger, film curator, fired at MoMA;

[alena williams]

Dear all,

Following up on Fred's message, I would like to ask if anyone has more
detailed information about what happened at MoMA.

This is the New York Times article:

MoMA Apologizes for Dropping a Film Critical of North Korea
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/movies/moma-apologizes-for-dropping-a-film-critical-of-north-korea.html

And the Indiewire article:

MoMA Assistant Film Curator Sally Berger Fired After 30 Years
http://www.indiewire.com/2016/06/moma-assistant-film-curator-sally-berger-fired-rajendra-roy-1201688989/

However, it is unclear whether Sally's statements were done in consultation
with MoMA's legal department, for example (and then the dept head was
caught off-guard), or if something else happened. Either way, Larry
Kardish's and Rajendra Roy's comments suggest that more is going on here
and that this was perhaps an opportunistic firing. If anyone has further
information, please let us know.

In some ways, the bigger scandal is the glass ceiling at MoMA for veteran
female curators. How is it that Sally, after thirty years of service, was
never advanced to a full curator title? The same happened with Barbara
London.

In the last decade, men with less years under their belts (Roy, according
to the observer, arrived without a graduate degree in art or film:
http://observer.com/2014/04/the-chief-curator-of-film-at-moma-on-being-grounded-in-a-city-like-new-york/
), but with international careers have been positioned as departmental
heads, and in turn, the work of women like Sally has gone underappreciated
and undervalued by the institution.

While the current system does seem calibrated to work against curators who
stay local and invest their careers in a single institution, the busy work
of maintaining a collection (in addition to programming) is significant and
often extremely gendered at MoMA. I find the whole situation disturbing on
a number of levels.

Many thanks for any information,
Alena


On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 7:10 PM, Fred Camper <f at fredcamper.com> wrote:

> I agree in general with David's comments, without knowing much about the
> specifics of the situation, but I wanted to post a cautionary opinion about
> online petitions. I just about never sign them. First of all, they usually
> have no effect. Second, when they do, their effect is often a bad one. More
> importantly, mostly they refer to very complicated situations about which
> the signers know little. In the larger world,  We certainly know that major
> institutions have fired people for unjust,  idiotic or even evil reasons,
> but I also know of people who have been fired, or have had their lives
> ruined, through online petitions or shaming for offenses that perhaps did
> not deserved that. (A recent example,
> http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/shame-on-you-tube-1.3086407 )
>
> It's a big enough challenge to act well in one's own life, and to treat
> well the people with whom one comes in immediate contact, and Lord knows i
> have not always succeeded in doing that. It is all too easy to sign
> something in outrage over some situation or other. The issues about which I
> feel I know enough to have an opinion -- we should use less fossil fuels,
> for example -- are not going to be affected by online petitions anyway.
>
> Do we initiate and sign online petitions to make ourselves feel better, or
> to actually make things better? As one-liner pieces of wisdom go, I am a
> great admirer of Gandhi's "Be the change you want to see ion the world."
>
> At the very least, it seems to me that someone who cares about this
> curator should try to do the work a good journalist would do and get to the
> bottom of the situation. An authoritative analysis that could show the
> firing was really wrong might actually help.
>
> Fred Camper
> Chicago
> _______________________________________________
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> FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com
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>
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