RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
2001-01-28 I used to watch the Superbowl. I used to go to Superbowl parties, where I would drink heavily and make noise and offer private bathroom prayers that someday this would all be over. And eventually it was.
Today on my annual pilgrimage to the Outsider Art Fair in Soho I was kept from my usual level of enjoyment by a distracting impulse to purchase something for the purpose of investment. I don't know what came over me. I think it may have been the woman from Westchester I saw wearing a bindi. In such a world, anything seemed possible�even spending more than a month's rent on a swirly, heavily-inked 5 x 7" ball-point pen drawing of a woman's face, made on hotel notepaper by an 86-year old man named Malcolm McKesson who dropped out of society 40 years ago (at his wife's insistence) to express his vision in a body of work which to date includes an illustrated novel, Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage, about a young man who's taught by a demanding mistress to wear lingerie.
Meanwhile the dealer is using clever wall texts to elevate McKesson to "highly collectible" status in the outsider art field�a nice New York Times blurb with the phrase "dark haunting eroticism and escalating prices" here, a little biographical sketch which claims he never consummated his marriage, there. (The less "average" an outsider artist's sex life, the better. The idea here is to get McKesson linked in a marketable white male American trinity with Henry Darger and A.G. Rizzoli, neither of whom ever had sex at all. Rizzoli was 40 before he had his first sight of a naked female�when the 3-year old playing in the yard next door took off her dress�prompting him to label the phenomenally-detailed architectural drawing of the imaginary skyscraper-cathedral with which this event corresponded in his mind: "Wondering, wondering, wondering we are engulfed in a highly fascinating puzzling wonderment. . .Incomparable is the word for it," Darger, on the other hand, thought little girls must have penises, and drew many that way.)
So I'm standing there, looking at this one cool sketch and thinking�Pro, I can afford it. Con, I really can't. Pro, I like it. Con, I prefer the art I make myself. Pro, it may be valuable someday. Con, this guy has been doing nothing but making these little drawings for the past 40 years�so that's how many, a hundred thousand? two hundred thousand? He's obsessive; it's possible. Pro, everything that was here 3 years ago is selling for 5 times the price it was then; plus the guy's 86, and you know what that means in the art market. Con, so he dies and I've put myself in a position to profit�how many more times do I need to get screwed on taxes before I'm able to accept that I have non-profit karma?