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50 New York Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in New York

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Robert Mapplethorpe's obsessive quest for fame is chronicled in this anthem to the the artist's pathetic bid for acceptance by the high-born and the low-brow of the New York art world of the 1970s and 1980s. His almost complete absence of formal training as a photographer finds a suitable literary parallel in his botched efforts to provide satisfying responses to inquiries, critical and otherwise, regarding his work. For example, the artist's gutter-level vocabulary and way of life , despite critical sanitization by the late curator Richard Marshall, have long since lost the luster they had back in the days when he was bedding men, women, and children en route to the retrospective held shortly before his death from AIDS in 1989. And documentation of the response to his work -- initially hailed as a restoration of classicism -- has not found favor in the more recent appraisals of his work, which have determined his work be the product of a very clever, knowing food stylist. Nevertheless, there are plenty of Yale graduates to be pawed over. Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra, and the son of Brice Marden (presented in a manner similar to the late artist's early experiments with child pornography) have had their hemlines brushed by Mapplethorpe. And there are better-known products of "tinytown," e.g., the New York art world who should have known better: Lee Krasner, Alice Neel, and Willem DeKooning. It is a sorry claim to fame, one predicated upon little more than proximity to talent and ambition measured by the size of the bank account of the photographer's late boyfriend -- and the size of that boyfriend's dingus. Still, this book provides the casual reader with a sense of how the late Bullwhipple saw himself: educated and worthy of serious appraisal. Better yet, it inspires the reflective reader to wonder why and who would ever bother to allow him to ever graze a hemline -- of any kind.