Say what you will about Jeffrey Deitch’s L.A. MOCA: The guy knows how to put on a show. For the last few weeks, the MOCA Meltdown has been the best story in the land.

Ed Ruscha resigned on Monday from L.A. MOCA's board. That makes him the last of the artists on the board to quit in disgust over its direction, following fellow L.A. icons John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Catharine Opie. All this was seemingly touched off by the sudden dismissal — or “forced resignation,” or whatever you want to call it — at the end of June of well-liked curator Paul Schimmel, alongside a spate of other terminations, as well as months of rumors of continued financial strain at the storied institution and a variety of other high-level defections.

Let’s step back for a moment, though, and take a trip through time back to the hazy, barely remembered days of 2008, when the long-simmering budget woes of L.A. MOCA came shrieking into the open. The museum had been overspending for years, borrowing out of its endowment to cover operating expenses. Then the global financial crisis set in, and all hell broke loose. Eventually, director Jeremy Strick was out, and L.A.’s bigfoot art maven Eli Broad stepped in to save the museum.

Even more than Brandeis’s attempt to sell off its Rose Art Museum, the L.A. MOCA Crisis of 2008 was the emblematic art story to fit that particular moment of generalized economic turbulence. It had the elements needed to resonate: backroom financial slight-of-hand, the suggestion that a beloved American institution had been living beyond its means, last-minute cobbled-together rescues.

Time moves on. In the general economy, as many pundits have pointed out, the true problems that caused the 2008 economic collapse were never really dealt with, just papered over. Nothing was done, for instance, about the overbearing power of bankers and their gambling ways. Now you have JPMorgan’s ever-expanding losses on unsupervised speculation, and the Barclays LIBOR-fixing scandal. Meet the new bankers, same as the old bankers.

At the same time, instead of actually learning the meaningful lessons of the crisis, the powers-that-be have used it to pursue ideological projects that really have nothing to do with it at all. I’m thinking of the rage for cutting government spending, which has now sent several parts of the world — Greece, Spain — into Depression-style tailspins, and actually made the project of putting the world economy right more difficult in the long run.

What does this have to do with MOCA? As Christopher Knight and many others have commented, the Broad rescue now appears to be an example of pursuing a solution that has nothing to do with the real problem, and is more of a pet ideological agenda of one man, Eli Broad. In 2008, the institution had a finances problem, not a curatorial problem. (In fact, one of the underreported aspects of the crisis is how savior Broad’s own outsized art ambitions had contributed to L.A. MOCA’s fundraising problems. The L.A. Times speculated at the time that MOCA’s impulse to overspend may have been nurtured by the fact that it had a new rival for fundraising dollars in the flashy Broad-funded Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, and didn’t want to be seen as “retrenching.”)