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From: blp Category: Art Date: 28 December 2007 Time: 04:19 AM Review: Read about this artist a few years ago in Artforum when he was interviewed alongside someone like John Baldessari (almost certainly him in fact) and a photo was printed of him looking, as I remember it, like any ordinary scruffy young artist. He'd come up with an idea that you probably had too, but was in the right place at the right time to be the guy credited with inventing it and have huge success off it: digital moving pictures. Now he's dead having walked into the sea off NY just a week after his longterm girlfriend took her own life in their $5,000 a week flat in the East Village and Vanity Fair has run the story illustrated with numerous glossy pictures of him looking like a Studio 54 regular, all natty suits, tousled hair longish at the back, cocktails and slick trainers. His girlfriend, older than him by five years, was a blond bombshell and had also had a notable art success with an animated film at the Whitney Biennale back in the nineties. After that they'd moved to LA (I think it stands for lunatic asylum) so she could pursue a film career and, after a passing dalliance with Beck, for whom Blake did some cover art, the couple became convinced they were being persecuted by Beck's sect the Scientologists and became increasingly deranged. They fled back to NY where they got the village apartment and began drinking heavily, then, very suddenly topped themselves. It's such a perfect story for Vanity Fair that it's hard not to believe they made it up or killed the couple themselves just to give it the final ghoulishly glamorous closure. If I didn't know from the Artforum piece that this artist actually existed, I'd strongly suspect the former. Also seems to me to be begging for feature film treatment, possibly by Tod Haines and that, if this happens, it will be one of the very few biopics that doesn't risk casting a lead who's better looking than the actual subject (Basquiat excepted). This touches on what disturbs me most about all this - the way the reality of the art world, especially in America, seems so much to have caught up with its cliché. This pretty artist, with his implausibly foppish name, immaculately dandyish clothes and, er, drop-dead gorgeous suicide blond girlfriend, all wrapped up in a generous measure of conspiracy theory: it's all like something out of Brett Easton Ellis or an episode of Miami Vice. Other than that of course, there's the schadenfreude, which turns the whole thing into a glorified feature on cellulite in Heat: this guy had the life I want (do I though? Do I? um...yeah) and it killed him. Hooray! I mean...Oh shit.