Parrino, Taylor and Goldstein:
In contemporary art world, it pays to be dead

By Dorothy Spears
Published: June 26, 2008
the International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK: For years, when the artist Steven Parrino wasn't jamming power chords on his electric guitar or tinkering with his motorcycle in his garagelike studio in Brooklyn, he was recycling his unsold paintings: twisting them into eccentric new shapes, smashing their stretcher bars or stabbing them repeatedly with scissors.
His destructive approach to art making earned him the admiration of some fellow artists, but it concealed a painful reality: There was no market for his work. In eight years and five solo New York shows, his former dealer José Freire said, he sold only two of Parrino's paintings, one for $9,000 and the other for $10,000.
Then, on New Year's Day 2005, Parrino died from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. Demand for his art has since increased, and in September a Parrino retrospective that had toured European museums surfaced at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. With Gagosian's high-profile endorsement and a limited number of works for sale - only two paintings and a dozen drawings out of 56 exhibited works - the top price for a Parrino in that show reached nearly $1 million.
Parrino's posthumous ascent was not an anomaly.
While Gagosian was busy folding unsold Parrinos into its seasonal repertory, Zwirner & Wirth was plotting a comparable resuscitation of the career of Al Taylor, who died in 1999 of lung cancer. And Jay Gorney and his colleagues at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery were busy tapping collectors and auction houses for paintings by Jack Goldstein, who committed suicide in 2003.

Call it the Dawn of the Dead Artist. The message from the market is as clear as it is macabre. In a quest for fresh material, blue-chip contemporary-art dealers are finding a healthy source of revenue buried six feet under.
With the soaring prices of contemporary art, dealers admit that they have a strategic incentive to seek dead artists and give them recognition. "It's supply and demand," said David Zwirner, the Chelsea dealer and co-owner in Zwirner & Wirth, which represents Taylor's estate. He said the limited inventory imposed by an artist's death can end up increasing prices.
"Although overall market conditions are not our only motivation, we are a for-profit gallery," he added. "There is a commercial angle, or we'd be going out of business."
All dead artists are not created equal, however. Several other important factors are at work in the surge of interest in Parrino, Taylor and Goldstein. First, all three were active in the 1980s, a period now considered hot.
Second, each artist's work fits into the context of each gallery's artists. Parrino, for example, is right at home in the somewhat macho male club at Gagosian, which shows the likes of Richard Prince and Richard Serra. And Taylor's playful use of materials and droll one-liners aligns with Zwirner & Wirth artists like Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback. Mitchell-Innes & Nash seems a cozy niche for Goldstein's provocative disregard for traditional image making.
And even if they did not strike gold during their lifetimes, Parrino, Taylor and Goldstein had earned the respect of their peers, adding to the credibility of their newfound status.
Despite the market parallels, the work of the three artists could hardly be more different. In his embrace of the American road, for example, Parrino, born in 1958, mined multiple sources, from zombie movies to underground literature to punk rock and extreme metal. (He often gave reverb and feedback performances in conjunction with his exhibitions.) Convinced that painting was dead, he then tried to jump-start it.
A onetime assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, Taylor shunned heroic impulses. Combining discarded objects like broomstick handles with absurdist gestures and lighthearted wordplay, Taylor even based a series of work on dog-urine stains, a joking reference to the so-called accidents and heroic mark making of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis.
Spectacle was a primary focus for Goldstein, who had himself buried alive in 1972 while a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. With a stethoscope attached to his chest, he breathed air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his beating heart. Like his performances Goldstein's short films, his recordings of sound effects and eventually his paintings combined a West Coast embrace of landscape with an almost scientific interest in technical strategies for image making.
With the significance of contemporary artists typically measured by their success on the market, Parrino, Taylor and Goldstein saw others - often their friends - faring much better than they were. Still, they refused to cater to dealers and collectors. In 1998, for example, Parrino responded to a Swiss dealer's complaint that he couldn't sell Parrino's work by sending a fax to Marc-Olivier Wahler, then a curator at the Centre d'Art Neuchâtel in Switzerland. The fax instructed Wahler to remove all of his works from the dealer's Geneva commercial gallery."Do not worry about damaging anything (damage is good)," it read. "Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show." Seeing his unsold works strewn across the floor of the gallery, Parrino coolly proceeded to cover their surfaces with black enamel and carve them up with an electric saw.After Parrino, Taylor and Goldstein died, admirers of their work assumed responsibility for what the artists had been unwilling - or unable - to do for themselves.
Still, the market's embrace of the artists within a decade of their respective deaths elicits some skepticism. "On the one hand, it's incredibly romantic," the artist Robert Longo said. "These artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it's about a commodity. There's a limited supply."
Comparisons to van Gogh are inevitable. The art dealer Theo van Gogh was not successful at selling his brother Vincent's work, said Joachim Pissarro, director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and a co-curator of a van Gogh exhibition opening in September at the Museum of Modern Art. Then, six months after Vincent's suicide, Theo also died, leaving the unsold trove of van Gogh's artwork to his wife, Johanna.
"Johanna was a very shrewd businesswoman," Pissarro said. "She knew how to sell a legend. But Vincent was also very, very respected among artists.
"Had van Gogh lived a few years longer, he would have been a millionaire."