Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #412331 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com
This sometimes hilarious, sometimes scathing book is the most honest account to be found of the fashionable, fabulous, and often ugly New York art world of the last quarter century. This was the first time in history when visual artists came fully under the glare of the media and evolved into pop cultural figures. Here are Andy, Jean-Michel, Leo, and Julian as only art and cultural critic Anthony Haden-Guest can present them. Revealing anecdotes (and gossip) offer a sense of how the art world really works, its politics, its scene, and how artists survive in it or not. Wry, witty, and insightful, Hayden-Guest provides an absorbing narrative on how the art world got the way it is and where it is likely to go from here. This fresh look into art and artists is quite a thing apart from studying at the museum or library; True Colors makes you feel genuinely present at the most chi-chi art opening or cocktail party in town.

From Publishers Weekly
Haden-Guest's gossipy and witty tour of the contemporary art scene, focusing on New York City with forays to California, Paris and elsewhere, probes a fickle art market where trends, connections, galleries and critics make or break reputations. It opens in the late 1960s, as conceptualists, performance artists and surrealists rebel against minimalism; moves through a flurry of movements from neo-expressionism to earthworks and graffiti art; and closes with a report on the 1993 Venice Biennale and a skeptical look at 1990s' developments, including confessional and victim art, ecological, computer and technological art. In a torrent of conversations, interviews, anecdotes, capsule bios and critical asides, Haden-Guest (Bad Dreams), an art and cultural critic who writes for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, profiles dozens of well-known artists such as Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Malcolm Morley, Donald Judd, James Turrell, Jeff Koons and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His engaging insider's account will appeal most to those already familiar with this scene.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The "real life" of the subtitle refers to the artists of the past 25 years: their ambitions, habits, and relationships with dealers, critics, and collectors, and, sometimes, their art. Like Calvin Tomkin's Off the Wall: Robert Rauchenberg and the Art World of Our Time (LJ 4/15/80), this chronicle of the New York art world is more anecdotal than art historical and is written with a keen detachment. An art and cultural critic for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Haden-Guest has honed his talent for gossip and amusement in Bad Dreams (LJ 12/1/81) and The Paradise Program (LJ 12/1/73). At a time when artist-movies like Basquiat and I Shot Andy Warhol are making the rounds, this should do well in public libraries, but it is recommended only to art libraries for the sake of inclusiveness.?Heidi Martin Winston, NYPL
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

I enjoy reading it.
This review is written long after I have read it, about 9 years !

As it is the first book I have a glimpse about the contemporary art world (focused mostly on US and a tiny part of Europe), I enjoy reading it. I did not (at that time) find any book with simiar nature. It looks like there are more books in the same category now.

Have fun reading it at your leisure time!

This book makes dolphin operas? a secret review

Although certainly with the pages are these words, these purpose built spores, like
feilds or kansas. And although again, like a cousin. I read this book and yet somewhere there were people outside the cover, some other story. Perhaps is pehaps is a juice box, what is needed here are vitamins. Such bitter health.

Read about art maybe?

for more secret reviews visit secrettechnology (add the normal web page bit to the end of that).

True Colors:The Real Life of the Art World
This book really has provided me the insight into collecting that I had always wanted to see. It was a fantastic,important and redefining period for art and collecting. Tremendously well done.