L ong story short: Richard Polsky had a hundred grand and a deep desire to own a painting by Andy Warhol. Due to ridiculously high demand and to nauseatingly passive-aggressive art market practices, it took the guy a dozen years to score his painting. In I Bought Andy Warhol, the author goes through the whole story, ratting on every snooty dealer who blew him off, narcing on the ex-Warhol sycophant who tried to sell him a counterfeit, namedropping mercilessly, and deconstructing the secondary art market in mind-numbing detail.
I Bought Andy Warhol reads like an art market confidential, full of juicy stories about legendary gallery owners, collectors, and to a lesser extent, artists. But unlike Anthony Haden-Guest’s contemporary art tell-all True Colors, IBAW is populated with big ballers and high rollers, whiny collectors, and pain in the ass art dealers.
Fortunately for the reader, this odd little group of rich art enthusiasts are full of vanities, eccentricities, and power trips that make for fun reading. Not surprisingly, the author casts himself as the sane Everyman trying to wade through the doublecrossing art market which he loves, but which also drives him to divorce and dire straits. Polsky has a breezy writing style and an endless collection of anecdotes culled from journals that he kept through the entire process. You can tell he has a true love for Warhol’s artwork, and not just Andy Warhol the celebrity. Frequently, though, he seems pompous, as when he writes “…I would join the elite group of people who recognized [Warhol’s] brilliance and owned a small but glamorous part of it.”
Polsky is the exact kind of guy you’d want to stand next to at a cocktail party. His stories about Ed Ruscha paintings getting splattered in food fights, his high-pressure trip to the New York warehouse where every unsold Warhol is kept, and his harebrained scheme to replicate Warhol canvases under the guise of appropriation art are all funny little tales. But with the millions and millions of books in the world to read, do you really want to go over 250 pages of one man’s hunt for “an ego-boosting trophy to hang on his wall?” CHAS BOWIE