Mark Kostabi Con Artist Analysis

Those are some of the sassier remarks by Mark Kostabi in “Con Artist,”Michael Sladek’s entertaining documentary portrait of one of the art world’s most outrageous provocateurs. Mr. Kostabi, now 49, made a fortune twitting that world until he went too far, and it slapped him down, making him a near-pariah. He is still trying to climb out of the hole he dug for himself.
Mr. Kostabi, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, seized the 1980s moment when the East Village art market was hot and rode it to fame and fortune. At the peak of his glory, Mr. Kostabi ran a Warhol-like operation, Kostabi World, that churned out thousands of paintingsconceived and executed by a factory of minimally paid assistants. In 1988, according to the movie,

One was a peep show that granted customers, who had paid 25 cents, a 15-minute glimpse of “the creative process at Kostabi World.”
His career collapsed after the art market went bust in 1990; in 1993 his publicist and close friend, Andrew Behrman, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud after selling fake paintings bearing Mr. Kostabi’s signature. That incident raises an intriguing question: What is the difference between an original and a forgery, if the original wasn’t executed by the artist whose name was signed to the canvas but by a crew of factory workers? Mr. Kostabi had already placed ads selling “original forgeries by the world’s greatest con artist.”
After the fall Mr. Kostabi moved to Italy, where he established a flourishing market for his work. He currently hosts a public-access cable game show in the United States in which art critics and celebrities compete to name his

Con Artist recounts Kostabi's ascendancy during the New York scene's '80s heyday, a rise fueled by a willingness to insult contemporaries, slander modern art as a sham, and indulge in outrageous PR stunts that not only blurred, but disintegrated the line between humor and sincerity. A court jester who willingly copped to selling art that his staff created (based on his ideas), Kostabi became a sensation by peddling kitsch without airs. And, like all good gimmicks, his brash shenanigans soon became less endearing than insufferable. That's also the case with the present-day Kostabi spied in Michael Sladek's prickly documentary, which details the artist's desperate attempts—via a cable-access game show, and a move to Italy that results in a commission from the Pope—to reclaim the spotlight he lost in the '90s. In its subject's desire for attention and validation, the film gets at the pitiful need and loneliness that drives fame whores. Nevertheless, it remains most compelling when bursting Kostabi's self-important bubble, as when art critic Donald Kuspit caustically derides the man's work as "Applebee's aspiring to be Olive