Cult of Personality

Paul McCarthy Andy Warhol Dan Flavin Jean-Michel Basquiat Keith Haring Matthew Barney Andreas Gursky Cecily Brown

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Moments after a press conference for “Jeff Koons on the Roof,” this year’s outdoor sculpture exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, a clutch of reporters made a tight circle around the artist. Clean-shaven, dressed in a metallic gray business suit and gracious to a fault, Koons hardly batted an eye as he linked the three bright and shiny chromium works on the roof—monumental replications of a child’s drawing, a wrapped candy and a balloon toy from his 1994–2000 “Celebration” series—to contemporary, early Christian, and Greek and Roman sculptures inside the museum. The reporters didn’t just hang on every word. They clamored for autographs. And they got them. “This is going right next to my Mickey Mantle,” announced a lumbering photographer, holding his prize aloft.

Only one other artist today excites this kind of hero worship: Damien Hirst. Koons and he both create provocative work. But that alone can’t explain their star power.

Is it mere celebrity that imbues them with the sort of aura that makes people seek out their company—and happily pay whatever their dealers demand? How is it that a handful of those dealers manage to attract—some might say manufacture— such supernovas? Do artists who have crossed into the cultural mainstream share a character trait that grants them not just social status but lasting success? Does their charisma affect their art profoundly enough to alter its place in history?

If there is no easy answer to these questions, it seems safe to say that however well received an artist’s work is, the legend around its maker and, sometimes, his dealer is often what gives them staying power. Julian Schnabel’s broken-plate paintings put him on the map in the 1980s, but it was his arrogance—he claimed that Giotto and van Gogh were his peers—that made him famous.

Of course, many successful artists make challenging, button-pushing work without spawning a cult following—Paul McCarthy and Marc Quinn, for instance. Perhaps it’s because their material is too dark to excite much curiosity about their lives, or because they simply decline to influence public perception of their oeuvre. Nevertheless, it is hard to dismiss the impact of personality on something as subjective as the valuation of art.

Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York, believes that an artist’s importance is determined by his or her work alone. “That’s what will survive over time,” she points out. “Dan Flavin had zero charisma, but he was a great artist. Russell Crowe, the actor, is not charismatic, but his fame attracts a crowd. They’re different things.” On the other hand, she says, “Leo Castelli had great charisma. He was the number one dealer in New York, the top guy with the best stable of artists, a consummate gentleman who was very accepting and incredibly charming. And the genuine excitement he stirred up for the art came partly through the strength of his personality.”

The New York dealer Mary Boone saw her own fame rise in the 1980s along with that of gallery artists like Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and Schnabel, especially after she collaborated with Castelli on a precedent-setting two-gallery show for Schnabel. “Leo used to tell me that his strength as a dealer was as a mythmaker,” she recalls. “I think he felt the art sold itself. It was people he made desirable.”

Perhaps that is why collectors today see gallerists as glorified salesmen, marketers of cultural merchandise rather than connoisseurs whose success with both clients and artists turns as much on their own charm as on their powers of persuasion. Joseph Duveen, early 20th-century New York’s leading purveyor of European painting, who handled clients like J. P. Morgan, remains the epitome of a dealer who built his business as a monument to himself, going to any length to sell a painting for an extravagant price, retaining (or bribing) scholars and conservators to promote average pictures as masterworks. The avant-garde gallerists Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim, Abstract Expressionism’s early champions, were bona fide characters who continue to be identified with the artists whose careers they shaped, the most celebrated being Jackson Pollock, whom they both represented, at different times and in very different ways.