Stephen Sprouse's 15 Minutes

New York is having a Stephen Sprouse moment – again. Late-Roman spectacle is passé, and artists who look and act like bond traders are going the way of…bond traders. The mood in New York has downshifted to a desire for authenticity, intimacy and the integrity that a quest for truth in art provides. With the city overtaken by French tourists (New York is now “on sale”), it’s heartening to remember that 25 years ago, when Sprouse’s rock and roll designs first revolutionized fashion, the whole downtown art/music/club scene was starving artists.

Sprouse was still in his chubby phase at 12 (and had been designing for 4 years) when his father brought him to New York to consult with fellow Indiana-born fashion designers Norman Norrell and Bill Blass. He asked them, “What would you do if this boy were your son?” Fashion critic Eugenia Sheppard wrote of the boy genius in the International Herald Tribune, “The most riveting thing about Stephen’s collection…is that he seems to know instinctively what plenty of top fashion designers haven’t really grasped yet. Fashion is no longer just a good looking dress or coat, but the total way a woman looks.” Sheppard’s closing prophecy is chilling: “Music has its Mozart and fashion may have its Stephen Sprouse.”

By 18, Sprouse dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design and became Halston’s main assistant. While he spent his days fitting the rich and famous uptown, his nights were devoted to his first love, rock and roll – downtown. In 1983, he set up shop in Andy Warhol’s old factory and set off fireworks in the New York fashion industry with his first collection. For the complete story of Sprouse’s roller coaster career, take a look at the gorgeous new monograph, The Stephen Sprouse Book, by fashion showmen Mauricio and Roger Padilha (Rizzoli). The Padilha brothers, who have the world’s largest collection of vintage Sprouse designs and memorabilia, and who credit Sprouse for inspiring their launch into fashion, reject the idea that Sprouse’s current influence is nostalgic. “We didn¹t set out to write a history book,” they said, “But to cover an artist who is as relevant today as he was 25 years ago. Stephen was really ahead of his time.” They equate Sprouse’s art with that of Eero Saarinen, Frank Gehry or Jackson Pollack, calling it “something unique that will always look modern…and turn heads.”

Along with the Sprouse Book, two Sprouse retrospectives this January coincided with the release of Marc Jacobs’ new Tribute Collection for Louis Vuitton, inspired by Sprouse’s iconoclastic 2001 graffiti bag. “Rock on Mars,” at Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street gallery, is a museum-caliber retrospective that shows off the protean Sprouse as the first “Warholian” fashion designer to create a fusion of art, music and fashion. In addition to 50 mannequins dressed in his original fashions, the show features drawings accented with fluorescent paint and exhibited under black light; Sprouse paintings (Iggy Pop crucified, Sid Vicious caught with his pants down); a wall of Polaroids; a few of the original grafitti bags chained to a bench and videos made for his fashion shows, in which Sprouse gambols like a puppy with his unearthly models.

Uptown, John McWhinnie/Glenn Horowitz Booksellers exhibited a raw archive of “rescued” early Sprouse drawings. These drawings, which predate Sprouse’s first collection, weren’t made for fame and fortune, McWhinnie points out, but out of necessity. Co-curator Carol McCranie pointed to one drawing done so early it was on lined paper, torn out of a spiral notebook: a half-portrait of a woman in a beret, from the Patti Smith album. Younger viewers seeing Sprouse’s work for the first time relate to the combination of his amazing aesthetic life with an erratic commercial one, finding a sense of integrity even in Sprouse’s commercial failure. Street artist Terrenceo Hammond, who was part of the downtown graffiti scene in the 80s, was emotional about the combination of Sprouse drawings and 20 year-old punk ephemera papering the walls. He mourned a time when “there didn’t seem to be any clear lines between art and music.” In that regard, Sprouse spoke for his contemporaries, for whom art, music and fashion were blended in the downtown New York club scene.

Uptown curator McWhinnie concluded that the current Sprouse surge is not the typical 20-year retrospective, but is based on the intense desire of his peers to carry on his legacy. Sprouse died tragically in 2004, at age 50, and although there is no more CBGB’s and the downtown street culture is as sanitized as Times Square, there is a whole new wave of starving artists, and the world as Sprouse expressed it is the epicenter of the New York zeitgeist. At the top of the Bowery, from the observation deck of the New Museum -- near the apartment from which Sprouse observed the New York punk scene being born -- the buildings of Manhattan disappeared in a white-out, while the Elizabeth Peyton show played out its last weekend and Sprouse bags sold like hotcakes in Soho. Would Peyton have succeeded with her intimate, intuitive, fashion designer’s rock-and-roll portraits without Sprouse breaking the ground before her? The whole world, top to bottom, seems to have caught up with his downtown aesthetic, and that makes Sprouse start to look like the genius of his generation.

PRIVATE EYE on the Scope and Armory Art Fairs/ NYC 2009

What I learned at the Scope Art Fair in New York this weekend is that the really exciting art is all happening in Berlin. Collector Michael Hort tried to tell me last summer…but I didn’t really believe it until I saw the galleries lined up side by side. My favorite booth, Wilde Gallery, featured street artist EVOL, who created city architectures with up to 75 layers of stencil applied with spray paint to found, flattened cardboard cartons. Price was immaterial – nearly every single piece had a red dot next to it, invoking the dealer’s motto that good work “sells itself.” The artist also had made a practice of transforming street electrical boxes into “little buildings” (i.e. on the street, also with stencils) and had the good fortune to be there when the City of Berlin was upgrading these boxes into an “undulating” style which resists tagging; thus the cheap old Platenbauden from the days of the DDR became “little building” bookcases. At $10,000, there were three left on Friday, before the weekend rush. Another tagger had left his signature on the sample during the Fair.

I heard a lot at Scope about LA painter Allison Schulnik, and her meteoric rise to fame since this time last year. Known for her thick impasto – compared in Art in America to “cupcake frosting” – Schulnik’s Cal Arts training was in animation, so her “Hobo Clown” character is available in 3 formats: painting, sculpture or clay animation video. In a series of 5, with two Artist’s Proofs, $6,000 buys you a signed DVD, which would probably be replaced by the artist if it ever got scratched. Again, this series at Mike Weiss Gallery was just about sold out by Friday morning.

The media machine is lapping up Schulnik’s mythology like whipped cream, but a savvy collector analyzed this work based on two factors: a “hook” -- check, that thick, swirling impasto that looks good enough to eat caught her eye – but then there’s the second factor, which is the final determination as to whether the collector puts down her credit card: is there more than meets the eye, beneath the surface? “Forget what other people are doing,” this collector advised, regarding the “rush” to collect Schulnik’s work. “Do you want to live with it the rest of your life?” Ultimately, the collector took a pass, calling the work not “mysterious” enough.

There was no coffee at collector and New Museum VP Laura Skoler’s open house breakfast, just mimosas. Drinking spiked orange juice, overlooking the city and the white planes of Laura’s apartment plastered in contemporary art, coffee was extraneous. I couldn’t help but overhear a statuesque blond tell two collectors from Kansas City that “you can always tell which artists are going to last.” When I asked her to explain, this curator, who specializes in emerging art and who recently returned to New York from LA, said it was a lot harder to define how she knows than it is to know, but ultimately said that her call was based on (1) whether an artist is already doing important work and (2) how connected they are to the network of artists that came before them. For example, she went to see Shepard Fairey at the Public Library. “Everyone thinks Shepard Fairey’s the Second Coming, but he disregarded any connection between his work and…Andy Warhol’s, for example, and didn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘appropriation.’” She said she left the event early.

The Armory Show took over two piers this year, one for contemporary and one for modern art. I went in at the Contemporary side of things, where the building was faced with huge canvases of what looked like spray-painted Kenny Scharf designs; later I learned they were “action,” paintings, done “live” by Kenny in a space suit rather than his underwear, due to the weather. There was also a space man driving around front in a goofy, custom golf cart, handing out donuts: this seemed to drive high attendance at Kenny’s dealer’s booth, which I avoided like St. Patrick’s Day in Hoboken, but understand was mobbed.

There was confusion among attendees about where the line was drawn between Contemporary and Modern art, but the young man in the press office made it plain that “modern” meant “resale.” In a year where money for “emerging” art is down considerably over last year, it made sense, according to one collector, for show management to appeal to more established collectors with perhaps deeper pockets by also including Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell, Jackson Pollock and other artists with more established values in this year’s show. Talking to collectors in the coffee bar, one elderly New Yorker lauded the Contemporary venue for being “more about art” this year, with less video and installation. Painting did seem to be making a comeback, although she and many other attendees mentioned being “overwhelmed” with the amount of visual stimulus. “Your brain draws the line at 1,000 images,” she said significantly.

Art consultant Cheryl Perkey, in town from LA and shopping for several collectors, liked Andy Goldsworthy at Booth 119 (Springer & Winckler), the images of the “Transparent City” (see-through buildings and the people who populate them) at Booths 433 (Robert Koch Gallery) and 446 (Julie Saul Gallery), Beth Campbell’s branched hanging sculpture, and particularly the “flow-chart of ideas” behind it, in Booth 831 (Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery), plus the work of Vic Muniz at Booth 721 (Sikkema Jenkins & Co). Noting that half of Cheryl’s picks were in the “modern” side of the show, I walked with another collector – who said he couldn’t stand any more of the “gimmicks” of the Contemporary side-- up a crazy, steep tower of roll-away stairs that connected to the Modern pier.

And there we breathed a sigh of relief. At last we had found the really gorgeous art. Very impressive show; not stuffy. For example, there was a Stairns Twins revolving sun piece at which, like its namesake, you could not stare. The atmosphere was less midway and more library, with thick, hushed carpets. There was some flat Cornell collage work at the very reasonable price of less than $10,000, and, at a Berlin dealer, Dash Snow’s work, produced for a solo show there a few years ago, was going for about half the original price. The Modern dealers looked disappointed not to have the crazy crowds found on the Contemporary side, but I wonder – who will come out ahead in terms of sales?

Starving Artist

I wanted lessons in sustainability, so for teachers I turned to the Amish, people who have been able to live as their consciences dictate for hundreds of years, for the basic reason that they can live on nearly nothing.
This is also Thoreau's premise in Walden: how much of your life's blood does it cost to pay for that designer handbag, and are you going to have anything left to put in it, when you're finished paying for it?
So we are enslaved by vanity.
I was thrilled to finally visit PS 1 this week, where the spirit of all the punks from Gertrude Stein to Divine is alive and well and living in Long Island City. Everything we cared about, and the passionate way we felt about things like art and music, is intact! I was sitting there in the glamorous, minimal, modern (in a Euro way) cafe, thinking specifically of William S. Burroughs. Also Patti Smith: she said (in an interview in French Vogue, on the release of her compilation CD "12") they wore clothes from the Salvation Army because they had no choice, yet poor as they were, she was "Baudelaire to Robert's Cocteau."
These are people who adore beauty, but beauty is as beauty does. They couldn't buy beauty, they couldn't just put it on - I can't remember what they were wearing (except for Burroughs' ironic mesh fedora that probably cost $2 at Woolworth's); they made it, and it was their souls that shone out. Look at Patti Smith: she is a lighthouse.
They became beautiful through guts and action. I notice that this beauty doesn't pass away, but gains strength as time passes.
Once a fat old woman told me she couldn't be a poet because she had a taste for silk.
I know to which camp I would rather swear allegiance.
I had the fear of God hammered into me by the Horts, who live in a 20,000 square foot 2-bedroom in Tribeca, and whose major collection of contemporary art I got to tour this week. Michael Hort said the only way to transition from promising art student to successful professional artist is thrift. In Berlin, you can rent an apartment for $200 rather than $2000, so you can afford to take your time, take risks, find your soul.
I said, So suffering builds character?
He said, It builds better art.
That's why more great art comes out of Berlin than New York now. The key to good art is taking risks, growing, or "maturing," to use Hort's word. And you can't, or won't, do that if you're afraid you might not be able to make your rent. That's when you get stuck.
Eureka!, in Hort's opinion, is a product of hard work. And low overhead.


P.S. The title of this entry will link you to PS 1's website.

Art for Adults

Every muscle in my body is complaining after 48 hours of running, running, running uptown and downtown to see art. If I kept up this pace I would be thin as a rope. I spent the bulk of the week in Brooklyn, by myself, going to previews of major contemporary art auctions and watching the live feed of the Sotheby's night auction on the internet over a bottle of wine, with my best friend from college, keeping a running tally of the final prices like a bridge score. Let me tell you, it was jaw-dropping entertainment to watch a Francesco Clemente painting - I think it was the image of a bullfighter, painted by someone extremely nearsighted - go for $41 million. Jeff Koons: the highest price paid for the work of a living artist sold at auction. Oh great, now we are going to be subjected to endless "art" of Jeff Koons' genitalia. American reverence for anything, including art, always comes down to money, and that's the dirty laundry of a capitalist society. A friend of mine in Brooklyn says in the future, maybe in as little as one generation, you won't be able to own a house in this country unless you inherit it. Thank God for critic Roberta Smith, who writes in today's Times in regard to Lawrence Weiner's current show at the Whitney, "As Far as the Eye Can See" (nytimes.com/design):

"Driven by the joy of language and quite a bit of humor, Mr. Weiner's ebullient work asks tough questions about who makes or owns art, where it can occur and how long it lasts. It reminds us that while art and money may have been inextricably entwined throughout most of history, art's real value is not measured in strings of zeros, high-priced materials or bravura skill, but in communication, experience, economy of means (the true beauty) and, yes, the inspired disturbance of all status quos."

Artist Joe Lewis III, who used to be head of faculty at CalArts and is now the Dean at Alfred University upstate (and who looks like a boxer more than an artist), characterized New York as the Old World compared to LA. In New York the status quo is status, whereas in LA it's all fluid: you can see what you want, say what you want, be what you want, wear what you want, make what you want; there aren't any rules. It must be admitted however that the exigencies of being a broke artist in a city of show-offs can produce brittle or superficial results.

The night after Sotheby's raked in $319 million (the house tacks on an additional 22% fee to the gavel price), I sat between Mr. Lewis and Lenny, the curator of a photo show hung in the lobby of an office building at 1155 Avenue of the Americas, where the snowy landscapes were a breath of fresh air against black marble walls, at a little opening night soiree. Also in attendance were Kathleen, the gallery director (who represents Joe Lewis's work, as well) and Gail, the artist of the evening, plus the gallery assistant and the artist's sister. I think we walked almost to Tenth Avenue to a little French restaurant; I have no idea of the name or whether I could find my way back there, but the owner took great pride in showing Joe and I (both ex-Californians: I was informed that if I lasted a year in New York, I was now officially transplanted) his beautiful, curved, zinc-topped bar, which he shipped in the cargo load of a boat all the way from Marseilles. I asked the owner if he had any of the newly legal absynthe, and indeed, yes; also pastis. Joe Lewis III asked me if I was going to get high. We knocked on the bar and I told him I had heard it was bad for your...reputation.

As we sat down I felt delighted to be dressed up, with artists, in a French restaurant. It was watershed moment; I was truly a grown-up, honored to be invited, sweating whether I was sufficiently witty to be admitted to such a party, and immediately stone deaf. The accoustics were so poor (the noted glass ceiling) that the only remarks I could hear clearly were those of Lenny, to my right, and of course, Joe to my left, who had a booming voice and gold front teeth. Lenny was a vivid reminder of Allen Ginsberg, albeit with a smaller, neater beard, much as one worn by an iconic Freudian analyst. He was equally balding, with the tasteful windshield glasses of the French intellectual. Lenny has been everything, according to Kathleen, even a hairdresser. Lenny spent 15 years in Catalan Spain (1/4 of his life, as he pointed out), and this is the name of the wine he wrote on my napkin:

MARQUIS DE RISCAL ROSADO

He said if you find a 1964, nab it, and be sure to call him. I was recalling our luncheon bottle of Rose in the South of France, light, slightly peppery and divine on a hot summer day - nothing like the boxes of Kool-Aid called Rose in this country. Lenny says Spanish wines are the real wine, as the vines in Spain were untouched by the major epidemic that destroyed so many old French vines after the War. The Spanish vines are ancient, he said.

He lived right on the border, near Morocco; his friends were some of the world's biggest drug dealers. He sat on the beach and watched them load 200 tons of hashish onto a boat. He "did it" all, and now he's done. He might smoke a little with friends or buy a bag occasionally, niggling his way through it with one or two of the little Moroccan pipefuls in the evening. "I don't want more," he said. "I have too much work I want to do."

"Salt," Gail the photographer piped up, "Is the new cocaine."

The waiter brought for the table three dishes of mystery condiments, which turned out to be hot pepper paste, a mystery glue that tasted like tamarind without the little screech of brakes at the end, and salt mixed with cumin. Lenny insisted we taste it, so in turn we each licked a finger and dipped into the dish, and I can report that I'll never eat my salt any other way.

Gail also confided that Labs are much less judgemental than poodles, and you should never buy a poodle that can't look you in the eye, because the whole relationship is founded on that rapport. I wanted to tell her about a study Wayne heard reported on the radio, in which researchers found that they were soon able to train wild foxes to find a hunk of meat, simply by indicating its location with their eye movements, whereas chimpanzees couldn't understand that eye movement at all and didn't even acknowledge it as a signal.

Joe Lewis posed the question, What's going to happen to other societies when they get what they think we have, like cell phones, video games, money?

The same thing that happened to our society, Lenny snapped.

He said he never could identify with LA. Last time he was there, he stayed in Benedict Canyon. At midnight on New Year's Eve, everyone went out in their back yards with their shotguns and shot a hole in the sky. He was simply repelled by this; he never liked guns. He says it's not the weather he dislikes, not the radiation, since Catalan Spain is the capital of sunbaked, and he soaked it up like a lizard. The thing he finds appalling about LA is how people who go there become imitations of themselves. "I prize authenticity above everything," he said.

In Japan and Korea, according to Lenny, the young women are gorgeous. Poreless skin, perfect eyes, perfect teeth, perfect nails, not a hair out of place: they wear only the best, buy only the best. The generation gap in those societies is literally two feet. The old people are this tall, with the long spine, tucked-under butt and short legs that were the ideal of beauty in Asia for a thousand years. They look up at the young people with their long legs, bubble butts, V-shaped torsos and chiseled jaws, and what do they see? They see a world that has no place for them. Oh, the young people generally treat their elders with respect, but it is a hollow esteem, since they don't look to them for any knowledge; instead, they look to their hand held devices for entertainment. The old people freak out, having absolutely no way to grasp or relate to what's going on around them.

"Look, imagine you're, say, a German peasant in the 1700s, a shepherd. You come down out of the hills once a year, on Easter, and enter the church: you sit down and hear a full symphony orchestra play Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. That is really transcendental music; it takes you the full distance, from A to Z, and on into outer space. It's like dropping 10 micrograms of LSD. You've been out in the pastures for months, with nothing but birds, the wind, the sheep bleating, maybe a flute if you're lucky, and then you go and witness this transcendental performance by one of the world's great geniuses. It's a mind-bending, trance-inducing religious experience. It is said that audiences greeted one of Beethoven's last performances of his work - he was already deaf - with utter silence. He thought his piece was a failure. Then someone managed to break out of the stunned trance he had induced, and he was heralded with thunderous applause.

"That's the kind of gap between generations people are experiencing all over Asia. The ancient cultures are not being passed down. The old people look up at the new race of giants," Lenny said, "And I reject that it's all the effect of nutrition. I think it's a paradym shift. So much of who we are is mental."

"Ugh!" Lenny interrupted himself, "I hear a child's voice in the restaurant."

He shuddered visibly. I stared at him, wide-eyed.

"This only started happening in New York within the last 5 years," he said. "In Europe, the children are civilized early. If they're brought into a restaurant at all, they sit quietly and watch. They don't try to rule the table with their loud, shrill voices."

Then he went off, talking about an occasion where he had gone with a large group of people to a fine dining establishment, where his meal alone cost $200 and the final tab for the table came to about $2500. So people were paying a lot for dinner, and a couple brought an infant into this restaurant. It proceeded to "cry and shriek and scream and piss and shit and projectile vomit through the entire meal, the little asshole! It was absolutely disgusting! Mother's little darling! Someone's got to draw the line.

"So I called the waiter over," Lenny went on, "And said, 'I have had to suffer through every disgusting bodily function during the entire course of my meal because of that child! It is absolutely disgusting, and I will NEVER eat here again; and furthermore, everyone at this table agrees with me. So you can just present my check to the people at that table, because I refuse to pay for it."

"What do you want me to do, sir?" the waiter pleaded, "It's only a child."

So the restaurant bought Lenny dinner because they refused to present his check to the other table, and he has never been there again.

"There has to be some prerogative for being an adult," Lenny said.