Art Kids Face Hard Truth and Hard Humor with Rene Ricard

by Ashley Huizenga
“There isn’t art today … sorry,” Rene Ricard explained, cigarette poised smartly in his fashionably foppish hand. How can he be so sure? Because he has “a flare for the obvious.” Of course it’s crushing to have a fabulously entertaining and intelligent figure come at you after an inspiring lecture of art and culture with such unhopeful words. Yet, letting your intellectual guard down, it does seem to be true. He has lived a life immersed in one of the most prominent and dramatically lively art scenes this century. His wistful nostalgia drenches his words like alcohol; he doesn’t look the audience in the face. We are ugly and nauseatingly dull compared to the smashing, vibrating, youthful party of New York in the late ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, a bright spark that could have only happened at that place and time.

Today there is no art world. Yes, it is true that there are great artists existing today. But an “art scene?” Rene Ricard is happier telling stories of the pure and exciting past before AIDS and PoMo wars.

Rene Ricard ran away from New Bedford, Massachusetts to Boston at the age of 16, and quickly involved himself in the literary culture of the city. At 18 he was off to New York, now not only a poet, but an underground actor, part of Andy Warhol’s Factory. He also appeared in the Warhol classics Kitchen and Chelsea Girls. Since the ’70s, Rene has been a controversial guru of taste in America and abroad through his literary and art articles. His most notable piece, which he wrote in December of 1981, was “The Radiant Child” for Art Forum in which he introduced Jean-Michel Basquiat to the glowing art world.

Ricard is often described as having a “tumultuous personality.” He has been known to demolish his own work, and in this art school lecture the tumultuosity was flaming. His comments on artist Julian Schnabel express this neurosis of opinion and passion — and quite amusingly too, one might add. Rene Ricard began the lecture quite aware that more than a third of the audience knew about him only through the character that depicts him in Schnabel’s movie, Basquiat. “The movie’s all bullshit,” he sputtered.

Ricard obviously is not happy with the nearly crazed, overly emotional Ricard of the film. He says he would never say “nigger” as he does so loosely in the movie; it wouldn’t get him very far in Brooklyn, saying words like that. Aghast, he claims misrepresentation, especially in being shown as a thief of Basquiat’s drawing from Mr. Chow’s restaurant.

Yet later, when asked if Schnabel is really an “artist,” Ricard exploded with a passionate, “Of course Schnabel is a good artist! Was Rubens a great artist? Can you stand his paintings?” Suddenly critical scorn turns to adoring reminiscing, “Besides … Julian was very cute.” Rene defends Schnabel whole-heartedly, denouncing the commonly held belief that the artist is mediocre, even going so far as saying, “Schnabel is the most brilliant person I ever met!”

The scene that Rene Ricard nostalgically rekindled, reclining limply upon the center-stage couch chair, was a happening and exotic one. You could go to the pier and find hundreds of teenagers selling drugs and hustling to make money for their sweet, little sex change operations, “the cutest thing you ever saw.” New York City was full of “young geniuses,” and the artists filled the clubs. The scene was becoming very “sexy.” Rapping (which had killed disco), break dancing, and graffiti writing flourished — pure and very site specific. In the spring of 1982, the Fun Gallery was the only one in the Lower East Side, where all the clubs and dealers were. By the end of 1982, there were more than ten galleries there. Some artists didn’t even want galleries. Keith Haring, for example, would draw in the subway and in public toilets.

But then that damn “gay disease” came to piss all over 1982. Clubs closed down, lovers went back to their girlfriends — no more Lower East Side galleries. The extraordinary time of new music and art vibrating along side each other down the streets withered away. “It’s just as gone as yesterday’s sunset,” Ricard lamented.

“Real art” has historical prerogative; it expresses the scene it grows out of. Without a scene, Rene Ricard can only ask for a shock once in a while from art today. Rene says, “Shock me. Hit me where it counts. It’s your job as an artist, not mine.” It’s quite sad how the present world of art is just a rodent’s teeth-gnashing battle for a shock here and there.

Who does he like now? Nobody. “I quit. I said goodbye to all that. I went to Italy. I got a tan.” And he looks damn good in a suit.