When Fame Was Art: Con Artist

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 7, 2011 9:20PM

When Mark Kostabi was vacuuming up press attention in the boom art market of the 1980s with his schtick as a sensationalizing salesman of secondhand Andy Warhol ideas, the question seemed to be whether or not he was the next terrifying stage the art world's progress towards a complete self-absorption with its own compromised nature. Unfortunately for him, mocking the compromised relationship between art and commerce became a lot less relevant when the bottom fell out of the market. 20 years later, Con Artist: The Story of Mark Kostabi, an entertaining documentary on Kostabi having its Chicago premiere on Friday at Facets shows him to be both pioneer and harbinger of one of the 21st century's most thriving species: the fame whore.

Part tragedy, part farce and part cautionary tale about the fame-obsessed manipulators of the attention economy peaking a little too soon, Con Artist shows Kostabi long after the days of selling $50,000 canvasses and pulling his own pedestal up next to Jean-Michel Basquiat's have been lost in foggy memory, a needy "black hole of irony" whose dated insights into the art world now seem quaint as he hosts a game show called Title This on public access television.

As an artist, Kostabi's best medium is the publicity stunt. It may be that he has missed his calling, that the Paris Hiltons, the Snookis, the Charlie Sheens and all the other denizens of the 21st century mediascape whom we feed with our press clippings should be paying this guy to turn their spectacles into dollars. It may be that he is actually one of them but merely peaked too soon to cash in on the residuals. Either way, Con Artist is an intriguing portrait of a chastened art world Icarus, a worn out thread of connective tissue between the consumer excess of the 1980s and the media excess of the 2000s.

Con Artist opens Friday at Facets Cinémathèque, 1517 W Fullerton, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.