LITMIR.BIZ

      When Warhol emerged as part of the Pop art movement in 1962, there was no established critical vocabulary with which to interpret his paintings for the public. Formalist concerns with flatness and medium dominated talk about painting, thanks to Greenberg’s persistent influence, but these were hardly applicable to silk-screened representations of soup cans, celebrities, and car crashes. Nevertheless, Warhol had galleries to represent him in New York and Los Angeles, and eager buyers. Twenty years later, the secondary market established that his paintings were good investments (although Warhol complained in his Diaries that his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns beat his prices at auction). For the generation of artists that came after Warhol, there was no single dominant critical voice or curatorial position that applied to contemporary art across the board. In the case of Neo-expressionism, the brash figurative painting style that graffiti art overlapped, several prominent critics took vehement stances for and against its value as an avant-garde, radical gesture. But what captured the public’s imagination more than these intellectual disagreements, were the expert marketing ploys that the artists and their galleries mobilised to establish the significance of the return to large-scale, gestural painting. Critics might howl in protest, but Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, and Georg Baselitz, among others, became art stars: their market popularity, stoked by their dealers, proved their quality. In the absence of a unified or compelling art criticism, the significance of an artist’s oeuvre was measured in dollars.

      The twin strategies of Warhol-style self-promotion and market validation propelled the East Village art world, which had its own talent, dealers, and press and sneered at the SoHo and 57th Street gallery districts even as it emulated them. Nightclub owners invited artists to curate exhibitions that, not incidentally, drew customers. Visual artists, musicians, and performers collaborated on multi-media spectacles at clubs, too. Artists rented small storefronts to show works they and their friends had made. Liza Kirwin characterised the East Village as ‘a community whose greatest ambition was to sell out’, in contrast to past bohemian communities, which articulated resistance to the middle-class norm.[10] She documented the reaction among specialised art magazines and the popular press, which was to mock the neighbourhood and its resident artists as juvenile poseurs. With art, the market, and the bourgeois buyer so intertwined in the East Village, it was obvious to critics that the art that was most promoted was least performing its critical, avant-garde function – at least they could agree on this negative assessment.

      ‘We are generous and shameless self-promoters’, writer LADY PINK told The New York Times in 2007.[11] This statement was true of graffiti artists from the beginnings of their careers. These young artists were eager to show their work, to sell it, to support themselves doing something creative that they loved. They were happy for the opportunity to continue to paint long after a career on the subways would typically end. (When the writer was no longer subject to the juvenile justice system, the consequences of being caught tagging in the subway were steep enough to persuade most to stop. Generally, writing careers were measured in months, not years.) Furthermore, an art career was a paying job when unemployment among young men of colour was rampant, 86 % according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 1977.[12] The subtext of writing – to declare one’s presence in a noisy, overpowering urban environment – became the text of graffiti on canvas. Some artists like ZEPHYR, BLADE, and SEEN repeated their tags insistently,

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