Mark Kostabi
American, Born 1945
Born in Whittier, California to Estonian immigrant parents, Mark Kostabi studied art at the California State University campus at Fullerton and moved to New York’s East Village in 1982 to begin a career as a painter, a composer, and a source of provocative quotes. “Modern art is a con,” he said. “I am the world’s greatest con artist.” Writes the New York Times: “In his relentless spoofing of the unholy relationship between art and commerce he is, in his own words, ‘a social satirist.’” Currently, along with his art career, he writes an advice column for aspiring artists on artnet.com, and oversees a public- access cable game show called “Title This” in which celebrity contestants and art critics invent names for his artworks. The assistants employed by his New York studio, Kostabi World, have been producing these works since 1988. His paintings have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Tirana in Albania. In the wake of the 1990 artcrash he established a second reputation in Italy where his sculpture of Pope John Paul II was unveiled in 2007. The film director Michael Sladek made him the subject of a biographical documentary, Con Artist, released in 2009. “I feel,” he wrote in one of his columns on artnet, “a magical pleasure when watching my left hand handing over a freshly finished painting while my right hand accepts a wad of cash. There's something beautiful about it. Like a wedding or something.” His current oil paintings tend to feature mannequin-like figures, typically faceless, in colorful and stylized urban settings. His two albums, Songs for Sumera and I Did It Steinway, can be purchased online.