True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World

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.

True Colors covers a period during which the prevailing artistic fashion has shifted as frequently as the focus of the Whitney Biennial, when art and money, talent and celebrity have often been confused. During this period, figures such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and Keith Haring have crossed over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture; and art dealers, like Hollywood power agents, have often claimed as much attention as those they represented. Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within this world, and known the players. He delivers here an authoritative and deliciously inside account.

Focussing on the lives and personalities of the art world's main players, and with a sure critical component, Haden-Guest gives us vivid portraits of the period's key artists as they strive to fulfill their ambitions. He does justice as well to the machinations of those who have come to control the larger drama-the dealers, collectors, and museum curators. Filled with incredible anecdotes, dramatically told stories, and subtle critical assessments, True Colors tells the story of the art world that we have never heard before.

"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 is an art and cultural critic who writes for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Times (London), and many other publications. He is the author of Bad Dreams, The Paradise Program: Travels Through Musak, Disney, Coca-Cola and Other American Empires, and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night.