On May 1, 1993, the 1980s officially ended. One of the most famous artists in the world, Anselm Kiefer, installed a funeral pyre of nearly 300 of his works at Marian Goodman on West 57th Street, one of the more prestigious galleries at the time. Afterward, there was a grand dinner at Industria downtown for 150 of the movers and shakers of the period. The floor was covered with white sand, and two long dining tables were set. As I remember it, ominous, strangely clad performers moved about looking like they were about to devour our flesh. Then the petites entrées: pig heads on decadent platters. I knew instantly. This was Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods.
The previous decade had been enormously lucrative for a select few in the art world, mostly white male artists, but the air was coming out of their careers. Their work, once highly coveted, was failing to sell at auction. Major galleries closed, and the younger dealers were doing anything they could to just stay open. A market recession was setting in, leveling the playing field. Suddenly, there was a kind of freedom in New York. Everyone was doing whatever they wanted. If you had a dream, if you had an idea, you could find a place for yourself to fail here. Or, if you were lucky, succeed. This was good news for people like me who had until then been looking on with jealousy.
I had quit making art, but I was desperate to still be in the mix, so I started calling myself an art critic. I wrote catalogue essays, reviews, articles for anyone who would have me. For a while, I lived with my wife, Roberta Smith, also an art critic, in a tiny fifth-floor rear studio on Avenue B that I bought for $5,000 from a lawyer who didn’t actually own the building. We never paid rent there. I remember dogs patrolled the hallway, we were robbed constantly, drug dealers lived downstairs. I was in heaven. It was the greatest period of my life. My recollection of it all is hazy. I didn’t keep precise notes of dates or names or locations. To quote a popular band at the time, it was an era of “Where were you while we were gettin’ high?” if not in practice, then in spirit. But everywhere I went, I brought along my Olympus Stylus and I would go click, click, click. I knew nothing about photography, but I went through 15 rolls of film again and again, developed them, and then put them away in storage. When I recently unearthed them, I found that I had some 40,000 goddamned slides.
