Social media has given us all the intense mania to be noticed. We document our lives and world through selfies, looking in the mirror as opposed to the window. And we stare down our like counts.
This obsession isn’t new. For an artist, getting noticed is the way to be able to eat off your career. Artist Edward Brezinzki and his antics have taken center stage in the documentary Make Me Famous, screening at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth this week.
Why Fort Worth? Producer Heather Spore is from the area. She later moved to New York City, where she and Director Brian Vincent spent years researching the mysterious life and rumored death of Brezinzki.
Set in the East Village in the 1980s, the movie takes the art scene as its backdrop. The protagonists swam in the same eclectic circle as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mixing archival interviews with updated interview footage from those who experienced the scene firsthand, Make Me Famous tells a story built on an intoxicating cocktail of art, substances, and true stories with a dash of folklore.
Brezinski was part of the carousel of artists gaining, losing, and rediscovering fame in the city at the time. He had his own brief moment in the spotlight but for something that wasn’t necessarily his art. He accidentally ate (up for debate) an asbestos donut belonging to the sculpture “Bag of Donuts” (1989) by Robert Gober, which sent him to the hospital, the resin torturing his stomach. It was a story neither Brezinski nor Gober could escape, even decades later.
The film, stitching together archival footage of the artists in their own voices in the moment and current interviews from Brezinski’s friends, takes a twist when they delve into his spirit, his art, his motivation, and the mystery of his reported but disputable death in Cannes, France. As even Gober points out, there was more to Brezinski than that one epic story.
One could argue this is where the real story begins. As his famous friends begin to question what happened to him and if he died or faked his death as the ultimate work of performance art, a dense story unfolds.
Make Me Famous traces Brezinski’s path of striving to be part of the art crowd while simultaneously seeming to sabotage himself and his own path to success. Or he just randomly enjoyed a ruckus.
It is hard to tell through the interviews where his desires really lay. Throwing wine in the face of the renowned would indicate someone does not want fame, just a good time. Yet that was what Brezinski did to Annina Nosei, the Italian art dealer for Basquiat and contemporary art gallerist. This, and his behavior toward her afterward begged the question of what he really wanted, if anything at all. The mystery thickens.
Make Me Famous is an enticing but abstract, boozy bohemian story that paints a picture of an artist whose end may still be subject to interpretation. A colorful and wild ride.
Make Me Famous
6:30pm Thu at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St, Fort Worth. $7-10. 817-738-9215.
