True Colors
A very entertaining book. Lots of gossip about famous artists and dealers. A lot of savage stuff goes down. For example, Brice Marden talks about becoming addicted to cocaine, then coming clean and changing his style from blocks of color to wavy lines. That pisses off his dealer Mary Boone since the new work is less salable. One of her strategies for controlling artists:
Get them into debt. What you always want to do as an art dealer is to get the artist to have expensive tastes. Get them to buy lots of houses, get them to have expensive habits and girlfriends, and expensive wives. That’s what I love. I really encourage it. That’s what really drives them to produce.
