From left to right: Eric Slater, Tina Alexis Allen, Brian Linden, Andrea Sooch and Candace Thompson performing in The Juvenal Players, Grand Arts, Kansas City, 2009
The very first public program I was tasked with moderating at MoMA turned out to be one of the most challenging of my 13 years of moderating programs there.
It was a talk with the provocative British conceptual artist Martin Creed. Creed had recently won the renowned Turner Prize for exhibiting Work No.227, consisting in the lights being turned on and off in an empty gallery space.
I did quite a lot of preparation for this program, practically memorizing his biography and familiarizing myself with his work. The format was going to be the standard introduction followed by an artist lecture and a brief sit-down conversation with me, interview-style, followed by questions from the public.
When Creed arrived, he appeared terrified. He said he was very nervous about speaking in public. I tried to calm him down, assuring him that my questions would be reliably softball and that it would be easy and pleasant experience overall. As he did not appear convinced, I added that if at some point he wanted to shift earlier from his slide presentation to the conversation we could do that as well.
After I introduced him, and he walked up to the lectern, he looked pale. After verbally stumbling for a minute or so, he then turned to me: “Pablo, I can’t do this. I need you to come up here.” I then came to the front and asked him if he wanted to sit down. “I prefer to stand”, he replied. So I stood up next to him, in some kind of hostage-negotiation situation, asking him questions about his work. The scene started to feel like one of his works. Finally, after 15 minutes or so, he relaxed enough that he agreed to sit down, and we carried on in a more regular fashion.
Over my many years as organizer of art conversations, I have had to deal with other, more or less dramatic circumstances: ranging from speakers storming out of the panel in protest, to a troupe of costumed performance artists storming into an academic lecture, to the power going out in the middle of a program, and even to having the keynote speaker of a major symposium, Stephen Jay Gould, not showing up to speak at a packed auditorium (unbeknownst to me at that moment, he had just passed away a few hours earlier). But at least I was never in the position of the moderator who, at a CAA conference panel a few years back, in front of hundreds of attendees, saw one of his speakers (who was participating via Skype and could be seen in a giant screen along with a clear view of his entire apartment) go to the bathroom and, with the bathroom door open, sit on the toilet in front of everyone, performing, without realizing it, the most public bowel movement in the history of academic art conferences ( I suspect he still doesn’t know, as no one dared telling him, including the moderator).
Indirect or directly lived experiences like these, whether avoidable or unavoidable, have taught me a lot about the art of moderating art discussions, a practice that we can’t say is a lost art because it has never truly been cultivated in the first place.
Unlike discussions about bad art, which tend to be very contentious and hard to detach from subjective taste, I will posit that bad moderating is a much more identifiable condition, more difficult to argue that it is good when it is not, and overall a great example about how our self-regard tends to get in the way or the goal of having meaningful exchanges.
Art panel discussions generally lie in a limbo of cognitive and theatrical value: more often that not, either the content or the delivery are not that compelling— and in some cases, neither are. The performed speech is not a forte in the art world. This is a topic that James Elkins and I collaborated in addressing at a symposium at MoMA titled Art Speech in 2011. Some of the aspects we tried to explore during this conference were the primacy of the written text in art history and the difficulties of translating it into the live conversation—whether in teaching or in the public forum. It was not too well received by some scholars, who tacitly supported the status quo of art conferences and saw our effort as a vicious critique of academic presentations in art. Our point had to do nonetheless with the lack of attention that often is given to the more performative aspect of pedagogy.
Scientific research, in fact, supports the importance of performative delivery in a live lecture. In 1970, at the University of Southern California, a group of scientists conducted a peculiar cognitive experiment. They secretly hired an actor to give a lecture to the psychology and psychiatry students, under the guise of a famous “Dr. Fox”. The actor, as Dr. Fox, gave a largely meaningless lecture titled “Mathematical Game Theory and its Application to Physician Education.” The lecture was filled with jokes, neologisms, and non-sequiturs. The actor/speaker was charismatic and had an enthusiastic delivery, but the lecture was totally lacking in any educational content. The students, however, felt it was a great presentation and gave it high marks after being surveyed about it. The experiment offered proof that a strong and compelling delivery, even in the case of worthless material, can be accepted as valuable, even if it is the equivalent of consuming food with zero nutritional value.
Dr. Myron L. Fox lecturing, 1970
Given that the panel discussion is in essence an oratorical structure, the most important aspect of it is the role that the moderator, as some kind of orchestra conductor, plays. And it is the moderator who can primarily make or break a conversation.
Acts of self-sabotage in moderating discussions are of course not intentional— rather, they are the result of a combination of various factors. These are too many to outline in one column, so in order to be as helpful as possible, I add here a few do’s and don’ts to would-be organizers of art discussions everywhere:
1. Do not invite a famous male art critic to moderate. He will take the opportunity to dominate the conversation, mansplain the younger (female) speakers and invoke a deluge of arcane references that no one will be in the position to fact check in real time.
2. Do not invite a famous media personality to moderate a discussion about art. He (I am afraid he will likely, again, be a He) will be convinced that he knows something about art, and will try to pontificate about the subject matter authoritatively opining about aesthetics and Cezanne. Having gravitas does not a moderator make.
3. Do not invite a scholar to moderate just because “they are knowledgeable about the subject matter”. It is very different to know how to use the Harvard citation style and knowing how to successfully weave a discussion between individuals.
4. Moderating is not an opportunity to display your intelligence or your depth of knowledge of art history. Instead you need to think of yourself as one of the audience members with the basic questions they might have. If you think you are the smartest in the auditorium, the greatest likelihood is that you are not.
5. While selecting moderators, make sure not to pick someone who is accustomed to hiding their face behind a piece of paper they are reading before the audience.
6. If you think a moderator’s role is to introduce the speaker and then come at the end to ask for questions, you are better off asking Siri to moderate.
7. Do not invite someone to moderate because the museum feels bad that they could not be included as contributors of the exhibition catalogue, thus moderating or speaking at a panel discussion functions as some kind of consolation prize (and likely a punishment to the attending public).
8. If the moderator is an artist, do not allow them to introduce the panel with a 20-minute slide presentation about their own artwork.
9. If one as moderator is the organizer of the panel, ensure that their significant other is not included amongst the speakers. They will be incapable to moderate that speaker and the significant other/speaker will feel carte blanche to speak about their work for quintuple amount of time than the others.
10. If you are moderating the panel discussion and have a renowned panelist as speaker, under no circumstances allow them to speak first. They will speak for an hour, leaving the five other panelists only ten minutes to divide amongst themselves to do their remarks before the Q&A period, at which time half of the exhausted audience will have left either the auditorium or the zoom call (if we are still in Covid times).
11. Ensure that your speakers know that they are expected to do. If a speaker expresses puzzlement for having been invited and/or not knowing if they can speak about the topic to which they were invited to discuss, it means two things: 1. they are incompetent or lazy; 2. It is your fault for inviting them or agreeing to moderate a conversation with such person.
12. Remember Dr Fox’s experiment lesson that emotion can simulate content, and that nonsense can feel meaningful. The objective is to deliver something that is meaningful in a compelling manner.
13. If you are moderating the Q&A session, after 60 seconds ensure to cut off the first person who does not ask a question and instead want to give another lecture in the form of a comment.
14. As moderator, you need to divide, but focus your attention, in four ways: the first is paying attention to what the speakers are saying and what how you will interconnect their ideas; the second is how you can draw their meandering thoughts back to the original river current of the topic in discussion; the third is your attention on the public and their questions and/or the areas where clarification might be needed (in case many inside-baseball references are made in the heat of the discussion). And the fourth is the practical aspects of the event such as time, structure and conclusion. Also: being a good moderator involves listening skills, empathy, curiosity, and the legitimate belief that other people who are not you are interesting (it is hard to believe that this needs to be stated).
15. You are a ghostwriter of conversations. Your job is well done when your presence goes practically unnoticed. It is like being a good Uber driver. A successful cab ride is mainly uneventful in its practical aspects. You notice the horrendous drivers who speed, take hard turns, and nearly crash or run over people along the way.
16. If no one comes to the discussion, it is a cause for celebration. Go out for drinks with your fellow panelists.