True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World

by Anthony Haden-Guest

The last quarter century has been an extraordinary and turbulent period in the art world. It was a time of creative intensity during which a handful of artists, like Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, managed, in their different ways, to cross over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture. It was also a time when other promising careers and even whole movements, like Graffiti, spurted to life and then just as suddenly disappeared. During the astonishing boom years of the 1980s, the newly vigorous art market transformed the role of dealers and collectors to give them unprecedented power as tastemakers and the dangerous glamour of Hollywood power agents. And then came the bust.
Writer Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within the art world, known the players, and reported on the scene for this entire span of time. True Colors draws on two decades of reporting to deliver an authoritative and deliciously inside account of the contemporary art world that will be the most talked-about book on art since The Shock of the New .
Haden-Guest gives vivid portraits of the art world’s key players and dramatizes the pivotal moments in the always evolving scene. Skillfully conveying a sense of the intricate geography of the art world, he tells of its clashes of ambition, its intrigues, its power plays. This is how artists survive, or don’t survive. True Colors is filled with telling anecdotes and expertly told stories that cohere to give a sense of how the art world works, its current state, and where it may be going.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, History

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

Reviews

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Loved the chapters on Schulte and especially on the horrid wretch that was Donald Judd. This is not so much a historical document as a series of nightlife columns done up in the sophisticated trappings of High Art. Nothing wrong with that, especially when we are talking about the go-go 80s where culture and cocaine were basically synonymous. In the end I really came to enjoy the fact that this book was just a series of self-contained gossip sessions (of various degrees of success/plausibility). Except for a few slip-ups here and there, Haden-Guest's writing felt surprisingly free of any hidden agendas, and the sound of axes being ground was pretty much silenced throughout. It says a lot that literally all you have to do to this book is change the names of the artists and it would be as 110% applicable to the art world of the 21st century as it was to the 20th century's. These same themes, jealousies, hero worships, and booms and busts keep churning through the gallery and art fair world to this day, and if anything at times this book feels almost quaint in how much it underestimates just how greedy artists, gallerists, collectors, and the like would become over the next few decades. PS. Though this book is basically 328pp of cocktail party fodder, here's one more: the author of this book is the half brother of Christopher "Waiting for Guffman" Guest, who by the way is a Baron.

[Scott H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dishy account of the art scene up till the early 90s. Fun, but the stories/artists Guest focused on in the later half of the book didn't hold my interest as much as I'd hoped. His other book, The Last Party (about the club scene in NY) had a much more volatile cast of characters that kept the book consistently engaging...but for anyone with an interest in the world of money/art as it unfolded over the 70s-90s, it's worth your time.

[Giovanni García-Fenech · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will appeal to a very small demographic: people interested in the New York art world of the 1980s. But for those of us in that group, the inside stories and the gossip are priceless. The book actually begins in the 70s (roughly where Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word ended) and ends in the mid-90s, and it takes little side trips to Germany, London, and even Denmark, but the really juicy stuff is in the middle--New York and Schnabel and Salle and Basquiat and the P&D group and the graffitists and the Neo-Geos and the has-beens and the never-weres. Fantastic.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally good (despite being dated in places towards the end when it looks to the future)

[Alessandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

"True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World" is a gossipy, name-dropping history of the hothouse art scene in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. It's a little like reading the privately-published memoirs of a tiresomely infighting family. While the parties, auctions, feuds, and events of this book are no doubt of great interest to their participants, they are rather less riveting to outsiders.

[Jenn Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read chapters of this from time to time. A quite satisfying gossip-fest. Kind of a Vasari's Lives of the Artists for the 80s and 90s. Kind of.