1980s: Commodification

Anne Magnuson, gliding down the Bowery mid-1980s

Business Art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called "art" or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business - they'd say "Money is bad," and "Working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. - Andy Warhol

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By the early 1980s the East Village was, on the face of it, a slum. Though it had always been a rough working-class district, the druggy squalor the neighborhood had by then reached was unprecedented, closest the the lawless 5 Points wretchedness of a century before. Winos slept along the Bowery, addicts lined up to cop outside of burned out tenements, city block sized fields of rubble stretched between Avenues C and D, and musician David Byrne remembers "the cheapest, skankiest hookers in town." The neighborhood's heroin trade was so rampant that it no longer felt any obligation to hide, and so an open-air drug market developed on the corner of 2nd Street and Avenue B as users "milled around the sidewalks and streets ... and steerers kept the beholded, cattlelike junkies in line with the smack of a stick." What scant police presence there was tended to thin east of 1st Avenue and disappear altogether before reaching Avenue B, leaving the Loisaida residents to fare for themselves.
     However, many moving into the neighborhood found romance in the poverty, even if that romance had more to do with the area's historically European abjection (i.e. the abjection of Jacob Riis, William Weegee, Bowery Bums) than the actual poverty existing all around them. The aestheticized abjection that Tom Waits sang about, the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side street-culture mythology that Luc Sante chronicled, was a product of nostalgia and wishful thinking.

I had gone [to the Lower East Side] in pursuit of bohemia and youth culture, in addition to the fact that it was a cheap place to live. I slept and worked and caroused in tenements with sloping floors, crumbling plaster, corroded plumbing, erratic heating, looked out through barred windows at garbage-filled air shafts and decaying masonry, but I was securely cocooned in marginality. The steam-table food in Ukrainian coffee shops was cheap, and so were he old clothes in thrift shops, discarded furniture was free. My monthly rent was roughly equivalent to my weekly wage, which was minimal. Relative material deprivation was not much of a sacrifice, considering that the payoff was independence from the societal and cultural mainstream.

The artists, writers and curators choosing to move into the neighborhood came to see themselves as under siege, and romanticized that siege (though this romanticism was somewhat undermined by the fact that these arrivals had chosen their self-consciously precarious positions, the same could not be said for the Puerto Rican and Dominican neighbors). Small storefront art galleries began appearing throughout the neighborhoods with names like Bullet Space, Civilian Warfare, and Virtual Garrison. A popular bar on First Avenue called itself Downtown Beirut.

By the early 80s the central artistic medium had shifted back from music and poetry towards the visual arts, and the aesthetics of the fime capitalized on the tropes of this urban wasteland. The Street Art that hung on the gallery walls self-consciously reflected the urban decline on the streets outside those galleries, though there's an obvious moral ambiguity in this, as that same urban decline was helping foster an environment cheap enough to afford this gallery scene to take hold. Additionally, the "street art" that was itself often created by, and marketed for, a middle-class avant-garde demi-monde, who had a very different relationship to urban squalor than their Loisaida neighbors. They were trading in the culture of urban wasteland, but it's debatable whether it was their urban wasteland to sell. It's one thing to make art from one's own poverty, and quite another to use another community's poverty as a ready-made aesthetic. Art critic Edit deAk described the movement as "slum vintage ... we have taken your garbage all of our lives and are selling it back at an inconceivable mark-up." Take that, Mom.
     For all the interest and investment in urban poverty, the early (pre-AIDS) artists of the 1980s were curiously - some might suggest opportunistically - apolitical, echoing the leftist rhetoric of street activism while embracing the curls and curlicues 1980s free-market hedonism had to offer. The reality - unemployment, failing schools, inadequate housing - had little to do with the white middle-class kids moving into the neighborhood with an art school degree in hand and an insatiable appetite for slum vintage. If anything, the poverty they sought out was a great boon to this new wave. As David Byrne writes, the poverty allowed "artists, musicians, and writers to live withouth much income during their formative years. It [gave] them time to develop, and it [gave] creative communities that nurture and support their members time to form." So.

The East Villagers were the last subterraneans who actually had a terrain, because during the 1980s the whole concept of marginality changed. Once the demimonde had served as a community of like minds for people alienated from middle-class values (artistic, sexual, political). Then, in the eighties, it became the "hot bottom" of the torrid art market, a place for collectors to seek out the Next Big Thing.

The neighborhood was also fun, and fun should never be dismissed too lightly.
     The leading gallery in the neighborhood was named The Fun Gallery, "the original idea behind FUN was that the artists didn't like the work itself, a place to show and see our friends, and to play music and to dance. We were a little posse. We helped put the East Village aesthetic on the map." The artists were unknown, the gallery spaces were affordable, and a community spirit among the communards overran later critical assessments. It was a scene created in the spirit of naive enthusiasm couple with naive ambition and undone at the moment when those enthusiasms and ambitions could no longer afford their naivete.

1980 (December) – John Lennon is assassinated outside of the Dakota Apartments by Mark Chapman. He was 40 years old.

1980 – Ronald Reagan elected President.

1980 – Jim Carroll releases “People Who Died,” taken from a similar poem by Ted Berrigan.

1981 – Jack Henry Abbott, author of the prison memoir “In the Belly of the Beast,” stabs and kills restaurant manager Richard Adan on the corner of 2^nd Avenue and 5^th street. Abbott goes on the run, leaving Norman Mailer (who had advocated for Abbott’s early release) to explain the event to the press. “Culture is worth a little risk.”

Mailer's press conference; not according to plan

     Early on the morning of July 18^th, 1981, a young playwright and waiter named Richard Adan was stabbed to death outside of the diner where he worked on the corner of 2^nd Avenue and 5^th Street, following a brief exchange with a patron. Adan was twenty-two, newly-wed, and his first play had recently been taken on by Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Theatre Company. The man who stabbed him, Jack Henry Abbott, was also a writer, though at the time considerably more successful, and was celebrating the publication of his first book, In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott was a small-time crook who had already killed another prisoner while incarcerated in a Utah penitentiary, and who had charmed writer Norman Mailer into a correspondence which ultimate saw the publication of the book and release of its author. Mailer first came across Abbott while conducting research for his book The Executioner’s Song, a chronicle of the trial and execution of Gary Gilmore. Abbott heard about Mailer’s research and, perhaps sensing an opportunity, began sending the famous writer a series of vivid and artfully brutal accounts of his own experiences inside the Federal Prison system. These appealed to Mailer’s well-documented interest in American male primitivism to no end, and Mailer soon arranged for the letters to be published as a book. Abbott was released from prison on the strength of his writing and on the strength of his novelty, and found himself celebrated by the New York literary elite for being, in the words of the Times reviewer, “an exceptional man with an exceptional literary gift. His voice is like no other, his language is sharp-edged and hurling with rage.” Both Abbott and the literary establishment had something to gain from his discovery and rescue – the well-intentioned folks at PEN were able to enjoy the frisson and socio-cultural relevance that accompanied the unadorned convict while, simultaneously, positing the redemptive power of art. Abbott, somewhat more prosaically, was let out of jail and sent on the path of an unlikely celebrity, and all the more novel for that.

     By 1980, there was a definite appetite among the cultural elite for the blend of high and low art, the poetic violence, that Abbott had to offer. Not that there hadn’t been violent events in the avant-garde before – the Beat writers of the 1940s and 1950s practically made them their stock in trade, between Caleb Carr’s 1944 killing of David Kammerer and William Burroughs’ 1951 killing of his wife Joan Vollmer. However, as inexcusable as they were, those acts were tangential to the Beat movement as a whole. They added a certain lustre, but the movement was already there. In the case of Jack Henry Abbot, however, the situation is somewhat reversed. He wasn’t being celebrated in the pages of the New York Times or feted by members of the PEN association in spite of his violent past, but explicitly because of it. Burroughs was a writer who killed, whereas Abbot was a killer who wrote.    

Gracie Mansion’s “The Famous Show.”

1981 – Patti Astor’s “The Fun Gallery.”

1982 (May) – Keith Haring writes in his journals: “In one year my art has taken me to Europe and propelled me into a kind of limelight. Everyone says it’s kind of scary. I mean, the situation. Things tend to get over-hyped and then consumed and placed in a ‘safe place’ (history). I do admit in some ways this does frighten me, but on the other hand: what is the alternative? Elvis must be Elvis. Looking at Willem de Kooning’s ugly new paintings at the show at the Stedelijk frightens me. I would rather die than become that.”

1983 (July) – Ted Berrigan dies, of cirrhosis of the liver, age 48.

Michael Stewart

1983 (September) – Michael Stewart beaten to death by New York Transit Police after being arrested for graffitiing the wall of a subway station. He was 25. Early on the morning of September 15^th, 1983, Michael Stewart was arrested by NYC Transit Authority policeman John Kostick for what should have been the misdemeanour offence of tagging a subway station wall. Stewart had spent the hours before his arresting drinking beer and dancing at the Pyramid Club, on Avenue A and 5^th Street, and when he was arrested that night at the 1^st Avenue station, he had been waiting for the Brooklyn-bound L train that would bring him back to his parents’ house in Clinton Heights. Instead, at three-twenty in the morning, the badly beaten and comatose Stewart was being rushed to Bellevue Medical Center’s E.R. by some very anxious cops, surrounded by some very frantic medical workers. Jeff Chang describes the scene:

[Steward] had bruises all over his body. His face and hands were turning blue. His neck was scarred below his Adam’s apple. There was swelling around his eyes, back to his temples and behind his ears. He was still hogtied – the cops had handcuffed him, secured his ankles with tape and then tied his wrists to his ankles with a cord. He had no heartbeat, no pulse, and no blood pressure. He was not breathing. The medics were yelling for assistance. They could not remove Stewart’s clothes because he was still handcuffed and bound. The head nurse tried to turn him sideways in hopes of helping him breathe. She would later testify that the transit police had fumbled around for nearly five minutes trying to find the key to the cuffs. Finally, the medics were able to get Stewart breathing again.

Stewart was kept on life support, but never regained consciousness, and eighteen days later he died from his injuries. He was twenty-five.

     The Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, charged six of the eleven arresting officers with charges ranging from perjury to assault to criminally negligent homicide, but was met with police intransigence from the start. What followed was a highly-publicized trial that lasted the better part of twenty-two weeks, noted for what could only be termed deliberate obfuscation on the part of the NYC Transit Police and the city’s chief medical examiner Elliot Gross, key details were obscured and key evidence lost (including Stewart’s eyes). What is certain is that Stewart, following his arrest, was driven from the 1^st Avenue L stop to a holding cell at the northern end of Union Square Park, directly across from housing for students from Parsons School of Design. During the trial, twenty-seven students testified to having witnessed a silhouetted struggle between several police officers and one faceless prisoner. One student testified that she could hear the prisoner shouting: “What did I do? What did I do?” followed by: “Oh God, please help me. Somebody please help me.” Transit Police countered that Stewart had been violent and intoxicated, and that the officers used justifiable force in subduing the 140-pound man.

     Stewart was black, the eleven officers indicted in his death were white, and in a city as racially charged as New York was in the 1980s, it looked to many like a conclusive example of racially motivated police homicide. Yet, despite high-profile demonstrations and charges of departmental cover-up, all six officers were acquitted. The Transit Authority saw itself as vindicated, and Kostick and the other officers returned to duty. Stewart’s family labelled the trial and verdict a farce. For many, it was simply seen as another in a long and ignominious line of racially-motived killings at the hands of an increasingly unchained NYPD. In the East Village, the Michael Stewart killing was seen as signalling a new and more open hostility between the community and the city at large. Stewart had been a familiar face at a time when the neighborhood itself was something of a small town.

     It is hard to imagine that Basquiat’s example escaped the attention of Stewart. They were the same age, they were both products of Brooklyn’s black middle-class, and they both operated in the overwhelmingly white milieu of Downtown art. Stewart’s death certainly had an impact on Basquiat.

If the dreadlocked Stewart was a logical alter ego, it followed that [Stewart] had died for [Basquiat’s] sins. After all, Basquiat had used his own idiosyncratic graffiti as a launching pad for his supersonic career … Not long after [Stewart’s death], Basquiat depicted the tragic event on a wall in Keith Haring’s building, in a piece called Untitled (Defacement) … Stewart’s brutal death was even more of a personal blow to Basquiat because of [Stewart’s] dating Suzanne Mallouk. Horrified by the killing, she began a campaign to investigate the incident and bring the police officers involved to trial. She raised money from a number of artists, including Keith Haring. But [Basquiat] refused to donate a penny. When Mallouk asked him for a contribution, he kept repeating, “it could have been me! It could have been me!”

     What happened to Michael Stewart no doubt once could have happened to Jean-Michel Basquiat, but by 1983 what had happened to Jean-Michel Basquiat could never have happened to Michael Stewart. New York’s love affair with street art had cooled. As far as the more ambitious galleries were concerned, graffiti art was over almost as soon as it had begun. As far as the city was concerned, graffiti was simply a crime, a reminder of the bad old recessionary days of shootings and stabbings and punks, altogether indicative of larger societal problems that did nothing but scare away much need investment. Haring and Basquiat had been shrewd strategists, and they were lucky with their timing, using the transgressive thrill of the streets to gain the attention of the Soho spaces they had coveted from the beginning. The strategy worked. In 1983 Basquiat was a celebrity and a very rich man, a friend of and collaborator with Andy Warhol, a frequent houseguest of art dealers Larry Gogosian in Los Angeles and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. In 1983 Haring’s works were hanging in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery and he was being commissioned to paint murals in Australia and Brazil. His images decorated vodka bottles and album covers. By contrast, Michael Stewart was still tagging walls and living with his parents. He had come to the party too late.

1984 – Deutsche and Ryan publish “The Fine Art of Gentrification.”

1984 (January) – NYPD launch “Operation Pressure Point,” an aggressive campaign targeting the heroin trade in the East Village, predominantly along Avenues A, B, and C. Unlike previous campaigns, Operation Pressure Point had the funding and agency to last for several years. By January 1986, more than 17,000 arrests were carried out, many of which were in federal court and prosecuted by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Rudolph Giuliani. Allen Ginsberg, while discussing the operation with the East Village Eye, commented: “It seemed to me to be the policy for the last twenty years to destroy the community of the Lower East Side. Apparently, the supply of junk has been manipulated by the powers that be to drive the poor out of the neighborhood: use the junk population to burn down the area. The deed is done.”

1984 (October) – Eleanor Bumpurs, a 67-year-old black woman, was shot and killed by New York City police officers during a forced eviction from her Bronx apartment. The Police were found not guilty in second-degree manslaughter, eventually settling with her family for two-hundred thousand dollars.

1984 (December) – Bernie Goetz shoots four black teenagers, who may or may not have been attempting to mug him, on a downtown Number 2 train leaving 14^th Street south. The shooting divides the city, with some celebrating Goetz as a vigilante folk hero.

1985 – Basquiat features on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, barefoot and tuxedoed. The headline reads “The Marketing of an American Artist,” article by Cathleen McGuigan.

1985 – Nuyorican actor Tito Goya dies, of cirrhosis of the liver, while awaiting trial for murder in Texas. He was thirty-four years old.

1985 (March) – Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” starring Madonna and featuring a number of East Village artists in cameo appearances, premieres. Critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker calls it a “think-pink fairy tale of love among the punks.”

     “Taxi Driver” was made a decade before.

1986 – Keith Haring opens his “Pop Shop” on Lafayette Street, a boutique selling murals, posters, and clothing designed by the artist. Writer Felicity Mason, who attended the opening event, remarked: “[Haring] has commercialized himself tremendously, but that is the Eighties. Commerce, money, yuppiedom; all of those things are very representative of the Eighties and he has managed, I think, to keep his artistic integrity.”

Saturday, June 13th. Woke up at 8:00. Walk over to [advertising agency] BBD&O to finish the painting ... we had a meeting with a man who wants to commission a project for his building outside Dusseldorf. The project sounds interesting. We take a taxi to see the BBD&O mural and meet [art consultant Helge] Achenbach and people from BBD&O to have dinner. Tony freaked out over the painting and saiys it's the best I ever did. Maybe it is.

Monday, June 15th. 9:00 AM: Flight to Geneva via Zurich. I hate flying at this time because it's full of boring businessmen. I detest businessmen. - Keith Haring, Journals

1986 – Keith Haring is commissioned to paint a 350-foot-long mural along the Berlin Wall in the black, red, and gold of the German Federal Republic. If Basquait betrayed some ambiguity about his position on the downtown scene, Haring took to it with an enviable ease. Haring had an instinct for reconciling Warhol's business manipulations with a sentimental if informed cartoon sincerity, and didn't seem to find any troubling paradoxes between the worlds of downtown poverty and midtown marketing. 
     Like Basquiat, he used public spaces to court public attention. In the early 80s, the Metropolitan Transit Authority began the practice of blacking out subway station advertising posters when their rental time expired, and Haring seized on these blank spaces to create a series of chalk drawings that were designed to become instantly recognizable to New York subway riders. Going straight to the public, Haring found a way of reusing both advertising space and advertising instincts to advertise his own presence in the city. His signature motif, "The Radiant Child", was both sweetly naive and media-savvy, and designed it charm its way into the hearts of embattled New Yorkers. As Bruce Kurtz writes, "universally comprehensible and, to face the issue squarely, culturally suspect." There was a time, as Robert Hughes pointed out, the Abstract Expressionists were loath to promote their own art, believing self-promotion the antithesis of artistic integrity. This was before Warhol. Now, self-promotion was as much a part of the artistic process as the paint itself. Haring was the inevitable culmination of process and commodification, medium and marketing. By the light of the 1980's art market, there was no room for highbrow divisions between art and product, as Haring himself seemed to realize:

The subway drawing opened my eyes to this whole other understanding of art as something that really could have an effect on and communicate to larger numbers of people that were increasingly become the harbours of the art ... [Art was] used as a way of separating the general population from the upper class ... I think those barriers started being broken down by Madison Avenue advertising, television, and Andy Warhol, but there's still a long way to go. 

Interviewed at the opening of Haring's Pop Shop on Lafayette Street, writer Felicity Mason argued that "[Haring] has commercialized himself tremendously, but that is the Eighties. Commerce, money, yuppidom; all of those things are very representative of the eighties and he has managed, I think, to keep his artistic integrity." It's important to distinguish between commenting on "commerce, money, yuppiedom" in the spirit of a later-day Claes Oldenberg, and embracing it with open arms. He was embraced in return. Barbara Haskey, curator of the Whitney Museum at the time, could speak admiringly of Haring's ability to circumvent the "art establishment" and its inherently restrictive and exclusionary ways - presumably an art establishment that, as curator to a major Manhattan museum, Haskell herself would be a significant part of. 

Warhol is the father of this new generation of artists who also seek a direct engagement with the public. Certainly Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Basquiat all attempted to make images that were accessible and generic enough that they could be accepted by every man without any critical intervention. In some ways they bypassed the art world establishment. [These artists] attacked the elitism that had dominated art for the past several decades, by going directly to the people with images the people could understand immediately.

If this attack on the "elitism ... that had dominated the art world" sounds familiar, it should. Of course, Haskell wasn't intentionally echoing the pre-war fascists that, aligned themselves with and catered to the populist insticts of the "every man". It's still somewhat jarring to hear those same accusations coming from the curators of museums built to accommodate the avant-garde. Jarring, but understandable in the climate of 1980s New York; art is a business before it is anything else, and a curator's job is, finally, to keep their businesses solvent and investors happy by offering up the exciting and the new. This is art as celebrity. Haring was popular, therefore Haring was good, and those who sneer at his radiant children belong to an antithetical "elite." In the case of totalitarian regimes, art existed in service to the state. Half a century later, art existed in service to the marketplace.
     Haring was both a sincere populist and nakedly self-promotional, and was able to defend his "culturally suspect" (and, as it happened, incredibly lucrative) mass appeal against the "upper class" criticism of his work as honest kitsch vs. elitist gatekeeping. To dismiss Haring was to dismiss Haring's audience, and so to align oneself with the forces of "class" itself. Critic Rene Ricard wrote that Haring's "Radiant Child" was "a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it's always been there, like a proverb." This is a complete reversal of Clement Greenberg's original argument against the manipulative hegemonic powers of Kitsch, implicitly political by means of an explicitly apolitical sentimentality.  

1987 (February) – Andy Warhol dies, following an operation at New York Hospital, age 58.

1987 (May) – Keith Haring writes in his journal: “Twelve-hour flight to Paris. Watch Jumping Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg. Take Valiums and sleep. They also showed Crocodile Dundee. Both movies have my T-shirts in them. Stewardess recognizes me and asks for autographs on plates.”

1988 (June) – Miguel Pinero dies, of cirrhosis of the liver, age 41.

1988 (August) – Rioting erupts in the East Village, following the police curfew on Tompkins Square Park.

1988 (August) – Jean-Michel Basquiat dies, of a drug overdose, age 27. His body is found in his Great Jones Street studio, which he was renting from the Andy Warhol estate. In the end, Jean Michel Basquait only outlived Michael Stewart by a matter of five years. In August 1988 the painter was found dead in the upstairs bedroom of the Great Jones Street studio he was renting from the Warhol Estate. He was 27 years old, profoundly addicted to heroin. In the wake of his death, Robert Hughes placed both the painter’s success and demise squarely at the door of an over-hyped art market as hungry for transgressive celebrity as for the artwork itself (if, in fact, the two could even be separated), writing that “the only thing the art market liked better than a hot young artist was a dead hot young artist.” A sizable portion of Basquiat’s commercial appeal, he argued, was rooted in the myth of an attractive and self-destructive “primitive” painting on the floor of his studio, an image Basquiat had both fought and exploited throughout his career. Pollock got there first, of course. However, Pollock, for all his self-mythologizing, was nevertheless simply painting. Basquiat, self-aware as he was, was both painting and performing an updated version of the Pollock myth.
     Basquiat's paintings continue to gain in value and his biography has transformed him from artist to cultural icon in his own right. In her book Naked City, Sharon Zukin sees a direct correlation between the astronomical commercial value of his art and the continued, now total, gentrification of the neighborhood from which it emerged:

Sotheby's recently auctioned a canvas painted by Basquiat in the 1980s for fourteen million dollars. These prices contradict the neighborhood's carefully nurtured sense of authenticity. They say the East Village of beatniks and hippies is dead, and that the neighborhood's deep local character, its ability to incubate art and protest and dissident culture, cannot be maintained. Gentrification deprives these social groups of the low rents and social spaces they need to reproduce local culture.

1989 – Daniel Rakowitz kills his girlfriend, dismembers her, and feeds her to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park.