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Description

A Humorous Look At The East Village Art Scene, circa 1985.

Promotional poster for Roland Hagenberg’s book East Village ’85. Text by Carlo McCormick, in collaboration with Walter Robinson and Paul Benney. Drawings by Mark Kostabi. 

The poster was created by Limbo Gallery and Roland Hagenberg.  The poster comprises a fake Monopoly-style board game set among the galleries of the Lower East Side.

Illustrator Mark Kostabi, known for his allegiance to the Warholian axiom “good business is the best art,” is the perfect match for Carlo McCormick’s tongue-in-cheek text (written with his famously glib colleagues Walter Robinson and Paul Benny). 

The boards includes references to a number of local celebrity gallery owners and other members of the East Village Gallery and Art scene, circa 1985.

Mark Kostabi

Mark Kostabi, the cocksure artist and provocateur who rapidly rose to prominence in the 1980s East Village art scene and became a regular fixture in Page Six, is the subject of Mark Sladek's 2009 documentary Con Artist. In 1988, he founded Kostabi World, his West 38th Street studio, having taken out ads in the Village Voice for, "Inventive artists wntd to provide IDEAS," and, "Skilled academic realist painters wntd to execute lge, wet oil canvases after drawings by Mark Kostabi." He rationalized his business model saying, "Most artists steal their ideas, I pay for mine.” Today, he splits his time between Rome and New York.

Reference
Rose, Matthew, "Whose Art Is It Anyway?" New York Magazine. Sept. 7, 1987.