A Fabulous Bitch Has Passed!

Mr. Finch wrote for Coagula for most of the 1990s, but by the end of the decade he had moved to Artnet. In a colorful remembranceposted on Coagula, Mr. Gleason wrote that the move was “like handing my high-maintenance pit bull over to someone who needed it more instead of sending it to the pound.”

Walter Robinson, Artnet’s founding editor, wrote a remembrance of his own on that site.

“He could be almost cruel with his judgments, and wrong, but he carried the core avant-garde demand for extreme freedom of opinion into everyday action, as if challenging the art world to live up to its haloed mythos,” Mr. Robinson wrote. “And of course he aimed most of his barbs at powerful successes — the best of them bearing Charlie’s insults as badges of pride — while succoring the out-of-fashion and beginners.” In his post, Mr. Robinson recalled one of his favorite Finches, not necessarily for its conclusions but for its style. The article, from 1998, carried the headline “Who Is the Worst Artist?,” and in it Mr. Finch compared Joe Bradley, Dan Colen and Rob Pruitt, saying spectacularly unflattering things about each and declaring a three-way tie in need of this tiebreaker:

“Which of the B.C.P. bunch would you NOT wish to be shipwrecked with on a desert island? Well, Colen has a practical side that could produce the needed tent or coconut. Bradley could certainly trade quite well with any putative natives. Rob Pruitt would drive you crazy with his irrelevant showmanship and, after, you prepared him on the spit for dinner, would taste flabbily bland.” For the record, Mr. Pruitt was the unlucky winner.

In a 2006 interview with The New York Observer, Mr. Finch defended his no-holds-barred approach and catty style.

“In any other field — politics, show business, whatever — a gossipy scandal sheet would be nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “But since the art world is so secretive — it’s the last unregulated business out there — this kind of thing was explosive.”

By that point, he acknowledged, he had lost some steam. Artnet would shut down in 2012, though it has since been revived.

“Now in the art blogs,” he told The Observer, “there’s this younger generation who thinks I’m this fat, old guy, that I’m out of it and know nothing. People are treating me the way I treated them. But it’s fine. What goes around comes around.”Charles Baker Finch Jr. was born on April 22, 1953, in Manhattan. His father was a utility company executive, and his mother, Angela Cobb (Havens) Finch, was a fashion buyer and later a homemaker.

Mr. Finch grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Phillips Academy in 1970. His grandmother would often take him and his brother to museums on weekends, Charles Finch III said.

“As he told it, the modern wing of the Met was what made him love art,” the younger Mr. Finch said by email.

He earned a degree in political science at Yale University in 1974 and dabbled in politics, including campaigning for Gary Hart when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. He also studied at Union Theological Seminary but dropped out.

His marriage to Mary Truitt ended in divorce in 1981. A second marriage, to Marion Callis, also ended in divorce. In addition to his son, from his marriage to Ms. Truitt, he is survived by two grandchildren.

Mr. Finch started writing for Coagula in 1992, a throwback in the computer age.

“Charlie would mail me hand-scrawled prose to be retyped for desktop publishing,” Mr. Gleason said. Mr. Robinson also mentioned that Mr. Finch wrote by hand or dictated articles to him by phone.

Larissa Nowicki, an artist who lived in Mr. Finch’s building, recalled in an Instagram post how she went from fearing her fellow tenant to befriending him.

“He cut an intimidating (sometimes terrifying) figure through the halls, and I avoided him until I couldn’t,” she wrote. “After a meeting in the laundry room, he barged into my apartment demanding to see what I was making, and then a most unusual, hilarious, frustrating, kind, exacerbating, generous friendship began.”

In recent days, she and many others shared the news of Mr. Finch’s death on social media and in an email chain, the comments running all over the emotional map as people remembered one of the art world’s more divisive figures.

“There’s no need for anyone to feel anything except a pleasure in knowing him,” Ms. Nowicki said in the email chain, “and the wild roller coaster ride that came along with being his friend or relative.” ###

[quote] Mediums

Oh, dear.

Typical New York bullshit. Celebrating small-minded people like this -- the cruel, the judgmental, the attitudinal because it makes one believe they are better/different than the "rest." This is why no on cares about New York anymore. It's like celebrating Woody Allen. Everyone else not in that small circle goes WTF? This is why shit like GAWKER et al...eventually goes out of style/business. Rotten to the core.

R3 How Charlie Finchian of you. He would be pleased.

R4 This may be going a bit over your head but try to concentrate. (I realize some of the daytime Soaps are starting soon, too, but we still have a minute.)

Do you have any idea what the artist/dealer/gallery/auction/collector scene is like? If you do, multiply that by 100 and that would approach the art scene of the 1980s through late 1990s. If a segment of the arts deserved to be called out, it was—and still is—high art.

Awww. That’s a shame.

He was a good lawyer and did right defending that accused black man. Poor Scout must be devastated.

[quote] His son, the writer Charles Finch, said he jumped or fell from a window on East 12th Street

Or was [italic]pushed.

He was pushed.

Bitch looked closer to 89.

Charlie was a frequent caller to Frank Morano's "Other Side of Midnight" show on 77 WABC. Listeners wondered why he hadn't called lately.