Make Me Famous: New York's Post-Punk Art Scene, Wrapped Around An Almost-Famous Artist

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

There’s always been something irresistible about recalling the anti-glam couch-surfing/squatting lifestyle of New York’s Lower East Side art, music and film scene of the ‘70s/early ‘80s.

Look no further than documentaries like 2010’s Blank City and 2000’s Basquiat quasi-doc Downtown 81.

There’s the obvious allure of big names in their who-can-afford-salad days. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jim Jarmusch, etc. And then there’s the Bohemian ideal of poverty as, dare I say, “fun,” the suffering artist experience being a doorway to greatness.

Edward Brezinski making the scene in Make Me Famous.

Brian Vincent’s art-doc Make Me Famous, isn’t exactly the first film to evoke that East Village scene.. But it shows the flipside of the dream of becoming a famously eccentric artist by focusing on the late Edward Brezinski, a creator more famous in those circles for his antics than his talent.

Brezinski was an unpredictable, hard-living type with a penchant for self-harm – most memorably on display when he encountered an installation called Bag of Donuts, an exhibit of fake food of the sort you might find in the windows of some old-school Asian restaurants. Denouncing it as pretentious, Brezinski ate one of the “donuts” and ended up hospitalized with formaldehyde poisoning.

He knew and partied with the soon-to-be “names,” and ran a sketchy studio called The Magic Gallery across from a men’s shelter.

He also tended to alienate possible patrons and others who might have helped him attain a career beyond conspicuous misanthropy. Though some of the people interviewed in Make Me Famous, remember him fondly, some – like consummate art-world self-promoter Mark Kostabi – recall him with derision as talentless.

Make Me Famous does sprinkle some interesting ideas around, including the notion that a “performative” approach to art is not all it’s cracked up to be. The actor and monologist Eric Bogosian recalls a hellacious sex-themed party Robert Mapplethorpe threw as a gallery launch, where not one piece was sold.

But back to the “bad boy.” Make Me Famous takes a side-trip in its last act to Brezinski’s possibly unintended last brush stroke – a death that was reputed to be faked.

Utterly frustrated by his failure as a sellable artist, Brezinski moved to Berlin, living in even worse squalor than he started in. Then he moved to France, where he died in circumstances so murky, the authorities weren’t even clear which city was his resting place.

This part of Make Me Famous almost seems like an add-on by director Vincent, an excuse to take a few side-trips. The camera follows Brezinski’s friends and fellow artists Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger.to Europe where they seek the truth.

If Make Me Famous had a mission statement, it might be, “We seek to find out why one artist becomes famous and another doesn’t.” There is no answer on offer. But the parade of post-punk artists and artistic legends is entertaining for anybody who’s ever followed that era’s art scene. For Canadians, it boasts the last interviews of two late countrymen, street artist Richard Hambleton and photographer Marcus Leatherdale.

As for Brezinski, the film suggests he’s finally found a following willing to pay increasingly high prices for his Neo-Expressionist work. Posthumous fame, but fame nonetheless.

Make Me Famous. Directed by Brian Vincent. Starring Edward Brezinski, Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger. Opens Friday, January 20 at Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. The filmmakers will be in attendance January 27-February 1.