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A few years ago, a sculptor-friend of mine with a studio in a then-scruffy part
of SoHo, called it quits, disgusted with the art world and his own slow but
steady slide into critical and commercial obscurity. He wound up dumping a
number of his constructed wood pieces on the sidewalk, mixed in with the other
funky detritus of a found-object maker.
A few weeks later, strolling in the same neighborhood, he recognized an art
dealer who turned pale as a ghost as they passed in the street. "Oh, my God,
I thought you were dead," blurted the dealer to my uncomprehending friend.
(The dealer had apparently scavenged several of the sidewalk throwaways,
assuming no living artist would chuck any of his work.) My friend thought
the incident both hysterically funny and emblematic of the price-gouging
and ever-striving art world.
Fortunately, my friend didn't die in his prime as so many other artists
have. Those artists who do, at least the ones with gallery representation
and some art market success, have a chance at establishing a 'posthumous'
market if a dedicated dealer or designated loved one attempts to scale
that demanding slope. The estates of less seasoned artists, such as Tony Greene,
the California painter who showed promising work in several exhibitions
in the late eighties and early nineties at Feature Gallery in New York, have
a much tougher time of it, competing, so to speak with still emerging,
living artists whose art production continues to flourish. While some of his
paintings are harbored in the prominent California collection of Peter and
Eileen Norton (as part of their foundation, the Norton Family Office), Greene's
work has all but disappeared from the art world's radar screen. "Even given
that Norton association, neither you nor I have seen that work around," says
Richard Hawkins, a California artist and friend of the late painter.
More acclaimed artists, such as the late David Wojnarowicz, long represented
by New York's P.P.O.W. gallery and the beneficiary of a strong-willed surviving
lover, had a smoother transition into the so-called "secondary market" of private
sales and auctions. Artist reputations, like high-profile brands in the product
world, must be continuously pushed and buffed. Publicity, good or bad, is critical.
On rare occasions, the perfect high-octane blend of market forces and popular
culture factors combine to create a posthumous "gusher" in the art world.
Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe are two stunning examples.
There was a bittersweet note of irony in their posthumous fortunes back in
October 1989 when property from the Robert Mapplethorpe Collection sold at
Christie's New York for the benefit of his newly launched foundation to the
tune of $2.2 million. Mapplethorpe had recently died on March 9 of AIDS at the
age of 42 after creating the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation the year before. It
had a two-fold mission: to provide funds for medical research to advance the
cure and treatment of AIDS and HIV infection and to fund museums and other
institutions to advance photography as an art form.
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Untitled (Amphora) (1984)
c. The Estate of Keith Haring
Self Portrait (1978)
Robert Mapplethorpe
Untitled (Nov 17, 1983)
c. The Estate of Keith Haring
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The top draw of the 600 odd lots from the artist's eclectic collection that
ranged from sleek Italian glass vases to a group of citrine diamond and gold
retro jewelry was Keith Haring's black felt-tip pen on terracotta "Amphora."
You could smell speculation in the air as bidders at Christie's drove the price
skyward. Just two months earlier, Haring had announced he had AIDS during a
lengthy interview and profile published in Rolling Stone and the bidders were
already circling the 'corpse' of the artist who would die a few months later
like a ravenous flock of vultures. The decorated vessel fetched a whopping
$231,000. The estimate for Haring's edgy and clever 1984 sculpture was $8,000-10,000,
the price range experts at Christie's believed the work was worth. (This was,
by the way, the same artist who began his New York career underground in the
early 1980's, making white chalk drawings on the soft black paper backgrounds
used for subway station advertisements. By 1984, enterprising 'collectors' were
ripping off the al fresco drawings of crawling babies and barking dogs as
their limos idled above ground.)
A few days after the Christie's sale, prices for Mapplethorpe's
photographs also went through the roof at Sotheby's New York as "Floral Stillifes,"
a trio of elegant photogravures printed on chine colle rocketed to $60,500, selling
for more than double its high estimate. Two self-portraits from 1980, years before
the ravages of AIDS stole his looks, "Self-Portrait In Leather Jacket" and "Self-Portrait
in Drag" each shot to $35,750. Both photographs carried estimates of $10,000-15,000.
Remarkably, all but two of the 25 Mapplethorpe photographs offered sold, tallying $396,275.
You get the picture. An artist dies, his prices soar, that is if the market bets values
will multiply. At that perfect moment in the late eighties, the sky (or "Bubble" as
it became known) was the limit. But even that glorious bubble popped and prices plunged
to earth like an invasion of David Bowie spacemen. In fact, that record price for
Haring's Greek-influenced, "Amphora"-like sculpture has never been topped at auction
though his work still sells for multiples of what they realized during his lifetime.
In May 1999 at Christie's New York, ten years after his untimely death, Haring's "Untitled"
acrylic on vinyl tarp painting dated November 17, 1983 and featuring a toy-like spaceman
grabbing a struggling figure by the tail, made $200,500, about $50,000 above its high
estimate. (In the last six months, two large Haring paintings from the estate have sold
privately through New York dealer Deitch Projects for $400,000 and $500,000,
respectively, according to Julia Gruen, executive director of the Keith
Haring Foundation, indicating his market is still climbing.)
The same oversized tarpaulin painting was previously exhibited (and priced at an
astronomical $250,000) in New York at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in December 1990 at
the apex of the art boom, just months after Haring's death. The exhibition was titled
"Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat." Basquiat, of course, was yet another fallen
idol of the eighties, dying of a drug overdose in August 1988 at the age of 27. Just
the combination of these two, street-smart wunderkinder underscores the rather brutish
nature of the art market, basically dishing up whatever will sell at the moment,
regardless of circumstances. Shafrazi, of course, was well within his exploitive rights
as a contemporary art dealer and constant champion of both Basquiat's and Haring's
work to stage the double-whammy ghoul-fest. (in his younger days, Shafrazi also tried
his hand at graffiti, spray-painting Pablo Picasso's famed "Guernica" at The Museum of
Modern Art in 1974 with the words, "KILL LIES ALL," permanently branding him a
persona-non-grata at that august institution).
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Given that Basquiat died unexpectedly and intestate, utterly unprepared estate-planning
wise, there's little to compare with Haring in this regard, who knew he was doomed and
tried to organize his affairs as Mapplethrope had done so brilliantly. He established a
foundation in his name, in part to support disadvantaged children's and AIDS-related causes.
What links all three, of course, are the stunning price trajectories the works sold
for after death. (Basquiat has become a blue-chip enterprise, with a trio of gritty
pictures selling for more than one million dollars, including his 1982 "Self-Portrait,"
which made a market-crazed $3.3 million at Christie's New York in November 1998.)
Whatever their fortunes had been like in life, all three have received massive media
attention, international exhibitions, scholarly publications and biographical studies
since their deaths: Patricia Morrisroe wrote an ultimately withering account of Mapplethorpe's
life in her 1995 Random House biography;
John Gruen, penned a much friendlier treatment
of Haring's life in 1991, "Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography," for Simon & Schuster;
and Phoebe Hoban composed an unauthorized yet authoritative portrait,
"Basquiat-A Quick Killing in Art"
published by Viking in 1998. The end is hardly in sight: Former painting
star Julian Schnabel directed "Basquiat," a Hollywood film version of the painter's short
and drug-filtered life in 1996, and Showtime recently produced and cablecast "Dirty Pictures"
a bio-pic about Mapplethorpe.
All these impressive markers, akin to a corporation building a brand name, lead to one thing:
a great potential for higher prices. But as Chelsea art dealer Howard Read of Cheim & Reid,
a long-time dealer of Mapplethorpe's work says, "It feels a whole lot different now than
it felt in the period preceding Robert's death which was this big, crazy, sort of last
hurrah before his long and very public death. Now it doesn't feel like anything quite so
volatile."
But Read's words are hardly reassuring. In the end, it's the legend that sells. People
still regale in the gory tales of Jackson Pollock's firey car crash and other spectacular
disasters experienced by the hard-drinking stars of the bygone Abstract-Expressionist era.
The art world, in fact, is always searching for its own version of James Dean, romanticizing
death and disaster to stoke the market and drive prices higher and higher. In a strange way,
the legions of artists who've died in their prime as a result of AIDS have eerily widened
that playing field for the martyred artist and created new opportunities for more legend-building
campaigns.
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