Robert Mapplethorpe Doing Time on West 23rd Street

Young:

That's Jay Johnson with Mapplethorpe in R1's photo.

Today, NYC would be unaffordable for him

His brother, who has a fraction of his talent and is marginally successful lives in NYC.

The other thread is too long as i don't go into threads in the three figures. so im coming here to say I'm liking this series.

Don't you ° mean jed not Jay Johnson?

And why can't i date Ryan Murphy. He's got this knack of representing us with his amazing choice of productions. Brilliant guy. And he's my type

Mapplethorpe is overrated, read his biography, how he exploited others, including his brother and minorities. And he was a true pig, scat and all.

He was hated by a few prominent Black gay artists like Essex Hemphill for his blatant fetishization. I know Warhol has his faults but he seemed to actually have an interest in people of color and their contributions and helped them greatly. Magglethorpe just made porn.

I read an interview with Fran Lebowitz who said that when she was changing residence she took all the photographs he had given her and rammed them into a trash can.

Catherine Guinness put one of his S&M prints up above her desk when she worked at Interview. It was so graphic that people working for Andy Warhol complained about it.

I'm reading Patricia Morrisroe's biography right now (I read the second half first and now on the first half). What happened to Milton Moore? The book mentions Robert got a letter from him saying he was in prison for murder.

Sam. Made a pass at me at a Marylou Whitney party in Saratoga when I was a college boy.

R5 - Jay - the brother, dear.

23rd Street Lullaby

Did he wag his staff at you R11?

Well Sam was in his 60s it was a few years before he died. He wasn't bad looking but I was invited there by a beautiful and hot blue blood boy from school who captured all my attention. I guess the 80s was the last time such labels meant anything. Wagstaff was Social Register as well. Sad story, my college crush died too of AIDS before 1990.

[quote]I read an interview with Fran Lebowitz who said that when she was changing residence she took all the photographs he had given her and rammed them into a trash can.

I found the interview R8 mentioned and seeing that the trashcans were out on the street makes the story even better.

[quote][bold]On their mutual dislike for Robert Mapplethorpe…[/bold]

[quote]“Peter and I shared the distaste for Robert. But one of the reasons is that Peter thought Robert was silly, you know, which he was. And he thought that Robert copied him in certain ways, which of course he did. Sam Wagstaff, who was the patron of Robert, tried to be the patron of Peter when they were younger – and Sam Wagstaff is also dazzlingly handsome – but Peter was not happy with that. Peter was not going to be a rich man’s toy, but Robert was dying to be a rich man’s toy.

[quote]“So Robert – in an effort, I always believed, to get me to tell Peter, because he really sought Peter’s approval – he was always giving me photographs. I mean, Robert was. He would just show up at my apartment, buzz the buzzer and I’d say, ‘oh that’s Robert, giving me more of his stuff’. He would like bring it up, and he would ask me, you know, ‘Did you show it to Peter? Did Peter like this?’ When I moved from the apartment, which was the size of this table [gestures to coffee table] but not as nice or as clean, I thought, ‘this is the perfect time to get rid of that Mapplethorpe’s junk!’ And there were so many of these Mapplethorpes. In those days the trashcans in New York were made of metal, and they were out in the street. This was in 1979: you had to bring your trash down to the street, and put it in these metal cans. There were so many of these Mapplethorpe photographs that I couldn’t get them into the can. I have this vision of myself, every time I see his auction prices, jumping on them so that they would break, so I could get them into the can.

[quote]“When I told this story once to Matthew Marks, many years ago, he said, ‘I don’t understand, Fran – I mean I can understand you didn’t like the work, or that you didn’t like Robert, but how could you not know that someone that driven would be famous?’ He was already famous, a little bit, in 1979. It just never occurred to anyone that his photographs would be so expensive, they would have so much monetary value, it never came to anyone’s mind. Obviously if I had known that, I wouldn’t have thrown them away. I also wouldn’t be here, I would be at my villa in Tuscany.”

The assholery and exploitation described by R6 & R7 isn't surprising.

I finally got this from the library, and I have to say it’s much better than I had expected and it’s really well done. I’ve been here nearly 40 years off and on and I learned a lot of new information and there are all these mini deep dives into different subjects as they emerge in the radius of the area like the birth of the luxury hotel industry, the first iteration of Broadway, early Gilded Age families (including Edith Wharton) even being the center of the American toy industry at one point.

Wasn’t Stanford White a little too old for him?

Yes, R19, but he took a shot at him.

Why did he take pictures of little boys?