QUESTIONS ASKED TO ADDRESS:
1. Should we be glorifying art that at it’s inception flourished by desecrating and mutilating public and private property.
2. How did it really happen overnight that a guy living on the streets becomes the toast of New York society and the art world? What kind of business (Anina Nosei, Mary Boone, and Bruno Bischofsberger) did that while other artists struggle to make an impression on NYC art galleries.
1. Beginning with the first issue, re: celebrating art that defaced public property. Firstly it’s a matter of opinion whether graffiti is “desecrating or mutilating”. More than some people find such interventions to embellish a city such as New York, but that’s really not the central question. Artists’ like the poet ee cumings was a reputed racist, and Picasso was notoriously abusive to his wives, mistresses, and children. In one famous, well-reported instance he instigated a physical fight between two competing lovers. Additionally, more than one wife/girlfriend of Picasso’s committed suicide. So really, it’s a matter of do we judge the person, or the art, and must we judge the two together or separately?
In comparison, graffiti in streets of New York doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, does it? Besides these acts of transgression more often than not get subsumed by the things they rise up to fight against: graffiti art became commodified in the early days of east village art scene (when many like Basquiat who’s art was really a world apart from most other so called graffiti artists actually came off the streets and were subsumed wholly in the gallery world. Another example is an artist like Vito Acconci who is most noted for masturbating under the floor boards of the Sonnabend Gallery in 1972, which was act in direct contravention of normative practice in the day to day world, i.e. public lewdness, let alone what one would typically associates with what goes on in a gallery—well, what we know about anyway. Now Vito Acconci is designing buildings, including the interior of my NYC gallery, he has an encyclopedic one person show up at present at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and an upcoming retrospective in Barcelona. And a few monographs on him to boot.
Lastly on this topic, imagine being young, hungry, and ambitious and wanting to be recognized by a wider audience for your visual output without money to purchase canvas and stretchers and what better way can you conjure to get noticed than to paint directly on the walls in the sole neighborhood where such activity is acknowledged as conferring value?
By the way, present artists such as Barry McGee, who has achieved public prices for his art far and beyond above what Basquiat ever achieved during his short life, boasts of the fact he continues to practice illicit acts of public vandalism concurrently with his traditional gallery art practice. Such assertions and actions, on the part of an artist well absorbed in the institutional mainstream, seem to me disingenuous.
2. How does an artist come in off the streets to be a seeming overnight success, and what kind of business structure catapults an artist such as this at the expense of other artists who appear as talented.
In the art world there are many variables that go into creating overnight successes, most of which so called overnight success occur over the course of many years, including Basquiat’s career. His father, a middle class accountant was utterly dismissive and unsupportive about Jean Michel’s work and was largely responsible for the artist living in the streets early on in his career. The irony being that now the father is the gate keeper of the Basquiat estate, controlling what does and does not pass as authentic.
Among the ingredients that launch a career from 0-60 with the speed of a Ferrari are certain romantic mythologizing ingredients, along with a level of critical response, and dealer and collector support of a particular ilk. In the case of Basquiat, being African-American at a time when there were no other significant contemporary black figures, and making art that was so raw and immediate added to his appeal. That Basquiat spent some time actually living on the streets only magnified the mystique.
Early relationships with curators such as Diego Cortes, who put Basquiat in a now famous PS1 Museum show, and Warhol, who appeared to be looking for street credibility and young blood when he was seen largely as society portrait painter again added to the aura and inscrutability.
Contemporary and not so contemporary examples of the above scenario abound. Joseph Beuys was supposedly struck down in a plane during WWII, and covered in felt and fat for warmth and protection while awaiting rescue, which though never substantiated (and probably not in fact true), served as potent symbols in his work and life for his entire career
Julian Schnabel banged on his chest and shouted for all who would listen how significant and important his art was, including publishing his own coffee table book with an imposing sounding Greek title and ended up becoming emblematic of a type of self-mythologizing that helped define the entire 80’s movement of neo expressionism, and beyond. Back to this delicate subject in a bit!
Throughout his career, Jeff Koons has always embellished his early limited experience with the commodities industry in promoting his brand of object fetishism, and marrying an Italian porn star certainly didn’t hurt on the way to achieving multimillion-dollar sales prices at auction.
Matthew Barney is another example, who began life at Yale as fashion model, and subsequently morphed into a narcissistic god, appearing like Cindy Sherman, though usually indistinguishable, clad in Hollywood style prosthetics, in all of his filmic work, and photography. In a sense not unlike Schnabel, but using unknowable myths of sexuality and creation to create a buzz, along with limited output and venues to view the work.
Really, these types of what appear to be instant levels of monumental success abound in the international art world and are today more common than not. I have experienced this in my own previous curatorial efforts though these artists seemed to flourish in spite of working with me!
There was Janine Antoni, who I couldn’t disseminate any of her early pieces in group shows, until Saatchi snapped up the contents of her entire first one person show. Christian Schumann, who Roberta Smith said bristles with talent when I first showed him in a group show at PS1 Museum I curated, and after his first one person show the same critic said he gave cause for optimism in the state of painting. Cecily Brown, who’s work I couldn’t give away, though maybe that says more about me, now fetches six figures for her work after appearing clad in tank tops in one after another fashion spread in the likes of Vogue, et al, and after word got out that her father was the noted critic David Sylvester, which fact she wasn’t aware of growing up—instant myth readymade for the glossies.
There was Anna Gaskell who dated Gregory Crewsden, her professor at Yale, who’s first one person show was bought en toto by the Guggenheim, not a bad freshman effort, and Saatchi’s latest, that has made headline after sordid headline: the former stripper who painted a portrait of Princess Di with a stream of blood dripping down the side of her mouth. Sorry but I did not make this up!! There were even those who speculated that Saatchi himself was responsible for this winning body of work.
Lastly, I am not a big believer in dealers who take credit for the trajectory of artists’ careers, when on many occasions they have their own selfish interests at heart when dealing. Really, though this is a bit self-negating, there are instance after instance where a dealers interests are at loggerheads with those of the artists they supposedly represent. Now is not the place to get into names, but there are repeated cases of dealers trying to control work by not fully revealing to artists opportunities that are presented, in an effort to control the whereabouts of pieces and in an effort to get larger commissions. On my way to opening in London I have experienced this over and again in the past few months. Another story.
In the end, hopefully, it’s the work that is left to speak for itself; and in the case of Basquiat it is the raw power and graphic freshness that are manifest in the paintings, the congested, dense imagery sticks in the mind and never departs. The overall energy is akin to figurative Pollacks. Long after the hype, the lightening-fast burn out of a life, this passing of this film, etc. the work is still achieving records in the marketplace that I am certain are here to stay. Surely the artist and his coterie of supporters never would have dreamed of such a state.
Schnabel and his hyperbolizing role in this story is left to the viewers to judge for themselves, but for sport, see how many of the directors works you can spot from hereon in.
Kenny Schachter