Freight + Volume Gallery’s bang-up group show “The Decline and Fall of the Art World, Part I: The One-Percenters†purports to be about “ruthless marketeering, commodity art trading, and corrupt price-fixing by the major auction houses†and how a handful of artists see this “ruin.†Sounds good. The standout part of the show is the map paintings by Loren Munk, and the best of the best is The East Village, a large-scale love note to the distant eighties scene. It is jam-packed, to the point of being dizzying, and an incredible historical document of this time of parallel universes.
Munk is a freak of art-world nature. His work is funky, rough, busy, bumpy, a little passé, and almost garish. He makes my taste filters bristle. Yet my obsession Geiger-counter goes wild (and not just because my wife and I are on the map). Munk is an artistic outsider and an information insider. His paintings are abstract versions of Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1870 portrait of the Impressionists—outdated in style but psychically alive with a sense of what the past means in the present and the love of a devotee. The Whitney should buy this virtual visit to a place where just staying up late or hanging out might earn you a spot on the roster. It did me.
*This article originally appeared in the August 12, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.