Vampire Weekend’s “Mary Boone” video

Millennial band Vampire Weekend’s song “Mary Boone,” the eighth track off their recently released album Only God Was Above Us, has me reveling in nostalgia for and reliving the trauma of the ‘80s in New York. It’s surprising, considering that band members Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson were only born in the mid-‘80s. How, then, the reference to Mary Boone, an ‘80s art dealer and art star maker, and “The New Queen of the Art Scene,” according to a 1982 New York Magazine article? But a New York band made up of Columbia University classmates would know all about that infamous decade when alternative rock musicians and avant-garde composers like the Talking Heads, Blondie, Sonic Youth, and Glenn Branca intersected with or rose out of the contemporary art scene.

I love the song “Mary Boone,” but the subject, in conjunction with the concept of the official video, has me reeling.

Very little happens. It’s entirely shot through the windshield of a car driving through the Lincoln Tunnel from the Jersey side. You see the driver’s hands on the steering wheel and his eyes in the rearview. But centered on the dashboard is a small brass circular statue of Shiva Nataraja, or dancing Shiva, aligned with the one-point perspective or vanishing point inside the moving tunnel, like a gun’s crosshairs. Shiva is a Hindu god, also known as The Destroyer, who must destroy to create.

The lyrics begin with the narrator ostensibly speaking to Mary Boone:

Painted white, new in town
You weren’t hiring, but I was looking
In those days, my working days
Came in from Jersey, not from Brooklyn

I moved to New York for grad school in 1978 to ‘make it’ as an artist. The 1980s were my post-grad ‘school of hard knocks.’ I had left my East Village tenement mid-decade for an affordable raw loft space in Hoboken, New Jersey, morbidly overlooking my landlord’s coffin factory. In this barely livable space, I transitioned from a performance artist into a painter. I, too, “came in from Jersey, not from Brooklyn,” though, in my case, through the Holland Tunnel to my downtown bartending job blocks from the tunnel’s mouth on the Manhattan side.

I was the first openly gay bartender at The Odeon, the artsy, downtown restaurant that defined that famous decade of Manhattan decadence. Tribeca wasn’t on the uptown radar before the London-born McNally brothers opened the retro-modern Odeon in 1980, originally an old working-class cafeteria in that bleak section of lower Manhattan below western Canal Street between SoHo and Wall Street. Coinciding with the election of Ronald Reagan, The Odeon soon became the site where New York’s wanna-be and actual glitterati in the worlds of art, film, publishing, recording, and fashion gleefully adapted to capitalism’s first mutation into neoliberalism. Jay McInerney’s iconic novel Bright Lights, Big City, about this mid-1980s substance-fueled era, has an image of The Odeon’s exterior on its cover. That’s how much this now classic institution represented the collision of those glamorous but ultimately superficial worlds.

Oh, my love, was it all in vain?
We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same
In a quiet moment at the theater, I could feel your pain
Deep inside the city, your memory remains

My friends thought I was a rock star for being a bartender at The Odeon, where I’d mix drinks for the likes of Robert De Niro, Raquel Welch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorne Michaels, Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, and Mary Boone. And many of Mary’s artists, including Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, and Ross Bleckner. One of the busiest bars in town, it took two of us on weekend nights to keep up.

For me, it was like feeding the walking dead their liquid poison diet that supplemented their Bolivian powder diet, as evidenced by too-frequent trips to the bathroom and nostril residue. They poisoned me back with their secondhand smoke—the days before smoking was banned in restaurants. I’d pull up to the front of that exterior at 145 West Broadway in my beat-up, bruise-colored VW Beetle with its rusted-out floor and cry for about five minutes before wiping my tears, taking a deep breath, and getting out of the car to start my shift.

Apropos that a band called Vampire Weekend would release a song referencing that era titled “Mary Boone.”

Mary Boone, Mary Boone
I’m on the dark side of your room
Mary Boone, Mary Boone
Well, I hope you feel like loving someone soon

Originating in SoHo, Mary Boone Gallery championed painting after the minimalism and conceptual work of the ‘70s. Mary Boone was big; her personality and reputation often overshadowed the large Neo-expressionist paintings of her artists. The scale of her artists’ paintings was primarily due to a time when artists of that generation could still live in cheap loft spaces after light manufacturing disappeared from areas like SoHo in the ’70s when New York nearly went bankrupt—the origin story of the ‘artist loft’ and urban gentrification, or how to exploit artists for cash. With SoHo already out of reach, my generation began to populate the more intimate tenements of the East Village and Lower East Side with small-scale works of brutally ironic pop, graffiti, and early postmodernism in small storefront galleries.

Boone and her artists became some of the most visible art world expressions of the cross-cultural celebrity encapsulated by The Odeon. Many of us in the East Village secretly wanted in as we simultaneously reacted against it. A few of us got in—Basquiat, Keith Haring.

Mary Boone was known for selling out every show. However, it was rumored that she bought what didn’t sell. Dealers make 50% of an artist’s sales, so she got the unsold work for half off. When shows sell out, it creates scarcity and desire, the requisite for a hot art market. It doesn’t take a genius to see how one could turn around and resell ‘scarce’ work for an even bigger profit. For decades, she was unstoppable until Boone closed her galleries after serving her 2019 sentence of 30 months in prison for tax evasion. Jailbird or not, I have sympathy for Mary Boone (and Martha Stewart) when you consider all the mostly straight-white-male-white-collar crime gone unpunished. Still, I personally know two artists who courageously fired Boone over, well, let’s say, a difference of opinion.

Crooked crime, petty cop
Not on the street yet, but it was cooking
In those days, the burning days
The one from Queens, not from Brooklyn 

According to Artnet, Mary’s response to the song was, “Why did they do that? Does this mean I’m a vampire?”

Chillax, Mary. While you set a high standard, perhaps no more vampire than is required for all art dealers today. (I guess I just ruined my chances of getting representation in New York again.)

Nothing happens in the Vampire Weekend “Mary Boone” video for over a minute, and then a shift occurs moments before the verse above. The music changes, and the camera responds with the slightest gesture that feels profound and exhilarating. A minute or so later, the camera is on the tile walls of the tunnel, passing outside the car window. Suddenly, deep below the Hudson River, you see the dividing line in contrasting tile with the words New Jersey on the side you are coming from and New York on the side you are going—through the looking glass, big city, bright lights.

The song’s bridge (er, tunnel):

Book of hours
Russian icons, and
Sand mandalas, and
Natarajas, and
Hex sign barns
Ando churches, and
Whirling dervishes
Long exposures, and
These two tunnels go west and east
Let me bring you my masterpiece
You’re the author of everything
Use this voice and let it sing

I never got my masterpiece to Mary Boone. However, I eventually exhibited my work in SoHo, Chelsea, and Lower East Side galleries. And though Andy Warhol invited me to Elaine’s on my 25th birthday, and I worked for Julian Schnabel for about a minute gluing broken plate pieces back onto his notorious broken plate paintings (his studio manager was a friend), and I turned down Ross Bleckner’s sexual advances on a blind date, and slept with Keith Haring—one of the sweetest of guys, none of this was because I worked at The Odeon. These things just happened in those days. But I was never mercenary enough to broker any of them into ‘success’—sadly, anachronistic for the ‘80s.

The Odeon is still a fixture in New York’s restaurant world today. However, I haven’t stepped foot in it since being fired after only one year by what most of us working there believed was a homophobic closet case manager. He couldn’t look me in the eye because he knew I would see him. It had something to do with my blaming him for nearly cutting off my finger. OK, I nearly cut off my own finger, cutting a hundred oranges by hand for juicing in preparation for Sunday brunch. All those VIP customers and their fucking Mimosas. I was promised an orange juicing machine to compensate for the worst shift of the week, which included restocking the bar after a busy Saturday night. And for what? The worst tips of the week since there was no bar crowd.

I remember Keith McNally interviewing me for the job. He knew and liked the owners of the restaurant I was leaving to work for him, La Louisiana, which worked in my favor. He said he was hiring me because I was his future ideal customer—the young, smart, successful artist of the next generation.

Left unsaid: We had to be young and beautiful, and we’d be fired if we didn’t kiss the asses of our VIP customers, like…

Mary Boone, Mary Boone
I’m on the dark side of your room
Mary Boone, Mary Boone
Well, I hope you feel like loving someone soon

 

Bradley Wester is a visual artist, writer, critic, and cultural activist. His recently published essay, “Shiny Object,” has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. That essay and parts of this essay, “Is Mary Boone a Bloodsucker?” is taken from his agented creative nonfiction manuscript about his southern gothic New Orleans upbringing and the New York art scene of the 1980s.