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“Everyone kind of started out on the street, and then certain people became very successful and very hierarchical, and Edward just wasn’t having it,” painter Frank Holliday tells filmmaker Brian Vincent in the documentary Make Me Famous. The story Holliday sketches in that one sentence portrays 1980s East Village neo-expressionist Edward Brezinski as a quintessential starving artist—a painter of integrity whose refusal to sell out precluded his own stardom.
Vincent doesn’t argue with Holliday, and his film at least entertains this mythic version of Brezinski, who is compared in passing to Van Gogh. As the title Make Me Famous indicates, the documentary also acknowledges Brezinski’s ambition and his dreams of getting off the street and grasping some of that success for himself. In the end, the story Vincent tells is not really about an overlooked genius. Instead, it’s about how our insistence on framing genius as a yes or no question reliably and efficiently destroys the human beings who make art.
Brezinski (born Brzezinski in 1954) grew up in Michigan. His father was probably an alcoholic, his mother was distant and support for gay children in that time and place was minimal. He studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art and then moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he lived across from a men’s homeless shelter and became part of the growing arts scene.
Brezinski’s moment of greatest notoriety came in 1989, when he attended a solo exhibit for Robert Gober at Paula Cooper Gallery. One of the pieces on display was an exact replica of a bag of donuts; Brezinski reached inside and ate one. Gober had treated the donuts with a toxic preservative, and Brezinski had to be rushed to the hospital. Afterward, he contacted the press, and the story became an art world legend.
The incident, in the context of the documentary, neatly encapsulates the combination of fierce commitment, shallow envy, failure and substance abuse that characterized Brezinski’s career. A passionate painter in surprisingly traditional modes (he is perhaps best known for his portraits and his crucifixion scenes), he was enraged to see the success of Gober’s pop art/Dada-inspired work. Probably drunk, he ate the donut as a kind of protest; he claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that he couldn’t tell them from the refreshments. Effectively, Brezinski participated in Gober’s commercial pop art spectacle; the only way he could become known was to appropriate someone else’s concept, turning his back on his own talent and work in an alcohol-fueled fugue of arch disavowal and despair.
Brezinski was very disillusioned by the end of the ‘80s. But even earlier in the decade, the documentary chronicles the push/pull between his hatred of sellouts and his desire to become one. Numerous acquaintances talk about his incessant, pushy, gauche self-promotion; at openings, he would pass out self-made invites to his own gallery shows, and he asked virtually anyone who visited his apartment/studio to buy his paintings. At the same time, he was a perfectionist who would often destroy his own work if he thought it didn’t measure up. Since he was a portrait painter, this often meant asking other artists and art world people—colleagues and potential connections—to sit for him for hours before trashing the paintings without even letting them see them.
No one in the documentary is exactly willing to say that the art Brezinski did finish was groundbreaking or Important with a capital I. Yet many of his efforts are eye-catching and impressive. An expressionist painting of Nancy Reagan, for example, has a striking, Warhol-esque quality with a mocking, evocative edge—Brezinski seems to be celebrating Nancy as a kind of gay icon even as he sneers at her for her and her husband’s callous indifference to gay people and the AIDS crisis. The Nancy painting isn’t remembered as a defining image of the era, but it could have been. “What’s the great difference between a Kenny Scharf painting and an Ed Brezinski painting?” curator Annina Nosei asks.
Maybe the difference is that Brezinski once tossed a glass of wine on Nosei in revenge after she failed to show up for a gallery appointment. Being an asshole can lose you gigs, though Brezinski was hardly the only asshole, or the only drunk, in the East Village. So maybe the difference is just luck and being in the right place at the right time. Fame and fortune are a roll of the dice; get the right number and you’re everybody’s darling. Get the wrong one and you’re nobody.
The film itself chronicles this calculus and occasionally questions it. “These people [with money] went out and exploited these people [artists], and if they could make them pay off, then fine, and if they couldn’t pay off, then they dumped them,” actor and curator Patti Astor comments with cheerful bitterness. When the filmmaker asks her why no one wanted to exploit Brezinski, she laughs.
Perhaps the laugh is because Astor thinks Brezinski wasn’t worth exploiting. Or maybe she laughs because she is aware that Brezinski was, in fact, exploited. An art scene, after all, requires sub-superstars: people who contribute ideas, passion and venues; people who show your work and lend you their work to show; people who argue about what’s good and what isn’t; people who serve as muses and take you for your muse; people who create a community around art and dreams, hope and vision.
Brezinski participated enthusiastically in the scene that launched Keith Haring and Basquiat and his friend David Wojnarowicz to fame. And for his pains, he got little respect, little love and a pauper’s grave in France, where he died penniless and alone in 2007 at the age of 52. The Reagan administration’s callous disregard of AIDS was merely an extension of the administration’s, and the culture’s, indifference to the lives of creators and gay people. We learn late in the film that Brezinski’s money troubles might have been solved by an inheritance had he not been estranged from his family. But of course, queer people are often estranged from their families, which is why queer people are disproportionately poor.
If the U.S., or New York State, or New York City, had a real arts policy and valued all artists rather than the select few who could be turned into investment opportunities, maybe Brezinski would still be alive. Instead, the U.S. has elected a president who hates the arts and LGBT people even more than Reagan did. Rather than cultivating and celebrating creators with talent, drive and dreams, we seem determined to create an endless carousel of Brezinskis, each of whom we are determined to strangle with the entrails of their own dreams.
Make Me Famous is a sad film because Brezinski wanted to be famous and was not. It’s an enraging film because it shows the extent to which we devalue and despise the arts and all the non-famous people who create them.
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Noah Berlatsky
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