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Christopher Wool’s Punk-Rock Art Show in a Fidi Tower
The blue-chip artist is over museums, galleries — and pretty much everything else.
When I arrive at the 1907 Beaux Arts office building a few blocks south of the World Trade Center, a guard in the slickly renovated lobby of 101 Greenwich swipes me through the security turnstiles to an elevator that takes me to the 19th floor. He has chunky black glasses and a white ponytail that mark him still as the trailblazing 1980s and ’90s artist he was, hanging out at the Mudd Club, partying with Nan Goldin, and admiring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti, Richard Hell’s punk poetry, and Jamie Nares’s Super 8 films. At some point, certainly by the time of his career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2013, he became admitted to the contemporary-art canon and, thanks to the interest of big-shot collectors, including the hedge-funders Robert Soros and J. Tomilson Hill, his works became trophies (his record was set in 2015, when a stencil of the word RIOT sold for almost$30 million at Sotheby’s).
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