Sidetrack Films
A still from "Beautiful Losers."
I guess it's tough to be a young artist who started out with nothing and became famous and successful beyond your wildest dreams early in your career. Or at least that would be the uncharitable way of viewing "Beautiful Losers," Aaron Rose's alternately winsome and irritating documentary about the art scene that grew out of his Alleged Gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1990s.
Despite the snide comment, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. Visual artists these days face a peculiar quandary. To all appearances, the 600-year-long narrative of post-Renaissance art history has crashed and burned against the brick wall of pop culture, leaving younger artists with a "tradition" no more than a few decades old. You can see all kinds of influences at work in the artists Rose profiles, a few of them even drawn from the art world (almost always meaning Pop Art or conceptual art from the 1960s and after). But their major source of inspiration comes from "street culture," a catch-all phrase encompassing such things as skateboarding, graffiti, punk and hip-hop records, street signage and advertising billboards, low-end commercial art, junkyards, vacant lots and other epiphenomena of urban and suburban existence.
I don't doubt that some of these artists know the work of Picasso, or for that matter Michelangelo, but it's all a distant, dusty abstraction with almost no relevance to what they do or make. This cultural shift has enormous ramifications, but arguing about whether it's a good or bad thing is pointless. As Rose's film conclusively demonstrates, the 20-something white suburban refugees who hatched an art movement in his storefront hangout on then-scummy (and since-gentrified) Ludlow Street were not allowed to remain outside the mainstream, or to retain any semblance of revolutionary or oppositional power, for more than a historical fraction of a second. Whatever their intentions may have been -- and, hey, like anybody else they wanted some measure of success -- they rapidly became commodities, sucked up not just by the high-end gallery world but by the worlds of advertising, fashion and product design.