A con artist preys until greed and credulity, honesty and dishonesty, compassion and irresponsibility.  Sometimes when you’re trying to fool other people you really fool yourself.  In the case of Michael Sladek’s humorous documentary, “Con Artist,” the man who attempted to outrage by being the bad boy of art found that the ultimate loser of the con was himself. Art is full of bad boys, but just when do bad boys grow up?

Of course, the current bad boy du jour is Charlie Sheen. At some point, he too will be old news. In the 1980s, Mark Kostabi was art’s bad boy.

Mark Kostabi was a local boy–raised in Whittier and studying at Cal State Fullerton. He became famous in New York as a leading figure in the East Village art scene during the mid-1980s. He was in more art exhibitions than any other New York artist. We know that because the East Village Eye gave him the Proliferation Prize” as proof in 1984–two years after he moved to New York.

Kostabi was by accounts, a gifted young artist, but then he acquired a taste for celebrity and a distaste for actual work.

Kostabi decided to go totally conceptual and hire people to do the work while he lived the high life as a personality. So in 1988, he established Kostabi World which had painting assistants to do the work for minimum wage.

Conceptual art is a movement in which the concept of the piece became more important than the traditional aesthetic concerns and at times was simply instructions that anyone could follow.  Consider the readymades of Marcel Duchamp such as the 1917 “Fountain” which was a urinal.  Christo created an “Iron Curtain”: oil barrels that blocked a Paris street in 1962 and the artwork was the resulting traffic jam.

Just what is Kostabi’s concept? That anyone can create his art? Andrew Behrman thought to cut out the middle man, Kostabi, and spent five months in jail after he was caught and convicted of forging paintings by his boss, Kostabi. Kostabi maintains that a real Kostabi is, not a painting he has made, but one that he authorized.

Concept art is meant to challenge what art is and Kostabi challenged the conservative art world, saying,  “Modern art is a con, and I’m the world’s greatest con artist.” But he couldn’t leave it at that, he had to add insults like, “Da Vinci and Michelangelo: I can see the dandruff on their heads as I look from above down on them.”

When the Japan bubble burst in 1991, prices in the art market fell as well. Kostabi was one of those artist who fell from grace, but it was perhaps hubris.

And he insulted the intelligence of his clients. He called Sylvester Stallone a “mindless dope” and the two got into a fist fight in 1988. His clients include: Axl Rose, Bill Gates, Debbie Harry, Brooke Shields, Norman Lear, Billy Wilder, Aaron Spelling, Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the documentary, he’s shown presenting a painting to Bill Clinton, but the scene seems pathetic.

Kostabi, now in his fifties, seems like a huckster. He has his own public access show, “Title This” (also known as “The Kostabi Show”).  People attempt to give his work a title, works that had no concept except could it sell.

Is that what we want with art? For Kostabi “Paintings are doorways into collectors’ homes” instead of a message of beauty or meaning.

While writing this review, I’m listening to a small movie about John Frame. In it, Frame quotes John Ruskin’s definition of fine art. “Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”

Frame’s art has a sense of poetic beauty. Kostabi isn’t an artist so much as a factory director/manager.  While he seems to have been saved by a commission from the Vatican, that seems more to be the stamp of mediocrity. He’s so safe, so ordinary, that the Vatican finds him an appropriate choice. Kostabi has become the art world equivalent of the used car salesman of hokey commercials. Even as a bad boy, he’s not that good.

“Con Artist” is a movie about a man who wasted his promise and was seduced by greed and vanity.  Michael Sladek’s documentary can be taken as a precautionary tale for artists or a tale about a local boy who made good but at quite a personal cost.