Atlantic Monthly Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
“A literate, knowledgeable, and highly personal voyage through the turbulence of the art world from 1973 to the present. One would be hard-pressed to find a more qualified guide than Anthony Haden-Guest. A splendid trip.” –George Plimpton
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.
‘sexier than Artforum, brainier than Vanity Fair.” –Kirkus Reviews
“A devastating account of the art scene during the past three decades.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Avid and unshockable.” –Art in America
“Anthony Haden-Guest has drawn a colorful and entertaining portrait of the New York art scene in which the key players of the past thirty years reveal themselves, their art, and their intrigues in ways they’ve never done before.” –John Berendt
“A literate, knowledgeable, and highly personal voyage through the turbulence of the art world from 1973 to the present. One would be hard-pressed to find a more qualified guide than Anthony Haden-Guest. A splendid trip.” –George Plimpton
“The many perplexed, insulted and injured victims of the contemporary art world can turn to Haden-Guest’s clear-seeing narrative for explanation of how things got that way. This is as good a book as exists about the mixture of raw talent, ruthless hype and cynicism that has defined the international art market over recent decades.” –Robert Stone
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