Celia McGee gets Eric Fischl attention for the publication of his new memoir:
He then watched, he writes, as a free-form-if-competitive art scene (“We all wanted to be famous”) metastasized into a playground for the rich, and decries artists’ wholesale subservience to the transformation of “the art world” into “the art market.” He marvels that a friend, the painter David Salle, is writing a column for Town & Country.
He’ll have three more book parties in the Hamptons in June, but he expressed weariness about the arrival of the summer crowd. “So many invitations to dinners and benefits and parties,” he said at his house. “That’s the biggest annoyance.”
He no longer plays in the star-filled Artists and Writers Softball Game, after his team had painted its shirts to be auctioned off afterward and “the price for mine quickly went into something astronomical,” said Mr. Fischl, whose paintings can sell in the millions. “It was really embarrassing.”
A World and Artist Transformed (NY Times)