THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 15
each, but buyers don’t get to choose which
pieces they’ll receive—they merely com-
mit to a quantity. “My paintings have
been two dollars or five dollars or twenty
dollars for thirty years, and I like that,”
he said. “There’s an informal network of
people who know my work. It’s not un-
derground anymore, but it’s not in an
art-world structure.”
His paintings hang in record stores
and rock clubs, dive bars and used book-
shops—spots where art is valued but
money is generally scarce. In the early
nineties, before they relocated to Brook-
lyn, Keene and Starling were living in
Charlottesville, Virginia, and working
as d.j.s at WTJU, the sort of idiosyn-
cratic public-radio station where you
might hear Lou Reed and Karen Dal-
ton and Afrika Bambaataa in the same
half hour. Keene feels a kinship with the
scrappiness of the independent music
scene. “The fact that a bunch of guys
would get in somebody’s car and drive
six hours to do a show and maybe eight
people show up, and they sell cassettes
or CDs from a shoebox—that was also
how I toured my art around different
bars twenty-five years ago,” he said.
Recently, Keene’s paintings have ap-
peared in the TV reboot of “High Fidel-
ity” and in the video for Purple Mountains’
“Darkness and Cold.” His work acts as
a kind of Gen X shibboleth, a signal to
people that they have arrived in a place
where it is O.K. to strike up a conversa-
tion about Matador Records or Sonic
Youth. “You know if you walk into some-
one’s house where SK is in the mix, you
already have a connection,” Karen Loew
writes in “The Steve Keene Art Book.”
These days, Keene gets up early (usu-
ally around 4:45 a.m.), draws on his com-
puter for a bit, tends to his pets, walks to
the Associated Supermarket to pick up
ingredients for supper, turns on the radio,
and begins painting. “I just love to work,”
he said. He’s a process guy. He’s often
compared to Warhol, but Keene feels
more in line with Robert Rauschenberg,
and with the installation artists of the
nineteen-seventies. “They set about to do
a series of tasks, and the performance was
the art work,” Keene said. When Keene
shows his work in a gallery, he often makes
arrangements to paint there, too. “My
paintings are the residue, or the souvenir,
of the performance,” he explained.
—Amanda Petrusich
pink paint from a plastic tub to sixty
plywood panels, each affixed to the Cage
by a loop of wire. He is often cited as
the most prolific painter in the world:
he estimates that he has more than three
hundred thousand paintings in circula-
tion. His outfit—blue shorts, a white
short-sleeved shirt, red sneakers, rubber
gloves—was dotted with paint. Certain
items in or near the Cage (a watering
can, a container of kitty litter) had ac-
cumulated so many paint blobs that
they’d become nearly unrecognizable. “I
love the idea of doing sixty paintings a
day, and finishing them, more than the
idea of trying to make one that I think
is perfect,” he said. “The whole system
is based on trying not to beat myself up.”
This month, the art gallery Cha-
ShaMa is hosting Keene’s first retro-
spective, at its Brooklyn Heights loca-
tion, and celebrating the release of “The
Steve Keene Art Book,” from Hat &
Beard Press. Keene’s work is vibrant,
graphic, and funny. He’s best known for
painting reproductions of iconic album
covers, from John Coltrane to Kraftwerk
to Hole, though he’ll paint almost any-
thing. (He has also been commissioned
to produce original album covers, in-
cluding for Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee.”)
Each weekday morning, Keene randomly
selects ten scenes, usually culled from
cheap art books he buys at the Strand.
He makes six paintings of each image,
working on them simultaneously, cir-
cling the Cage, adding one color at a
time. There is something modest and
machinelike about the way he drifts
peacefully from piece to piece, never
pausing to fuss over the results.
Keene and his wife, Starling, an ar-
chitect, have lived and worked in the stu-
dio for twenty-six years. The building
was once an auto-body shop; Keene built
and installed a series of lofts and risers
for sleeping and lounging. The couple
raised two daughters there, and share the
space with two dogs and four cats. That
day, Keene was re-creating the grainy
portrait from the cover of Neil Young’s
“Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” a
vintage Norman Rockwell illustration of
an aproned matriarch putting a roast tur-
key on a dining table (he’d added the
words “Food Blog” to the bottom), and
a Chinese-takeout carton, among other
images. Keene sells his paintings on his
Web site, usually for around ten dollars
1
THEPAINTINGLIFE
PROLIFIC
O
n a recent afternoon, the painter
Steve Keene stood inside “the
Cage,” a room fashioned from chain-
link fencing and large sheets of plywood,
situated in the center of his home stu-
dio, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Keene,
who is sixty-five, was applying dabs of
still crucial to Diesel’s image. Two years
ago, the brand’s profile got a boost from
the arrival of a new creative director, the
Belgian Glenn Martens. (Among his
designs: a pair of jeans fused with boots.)
When Kanye West briefly courted Julia
Fox, last winter, he brought her to a hotel
room lined with Martens-designed Die-
sel clothing from the Spring 2022 col-
lection to try on. In one photograph
from that day, Fox had on a skintight
denim ensemble and was straddling
West on the floor.
“With Julia it was nice, because Die-
sel at that moment was starting to be
cooler,” Rosso said. (As for his friend
West, he is “a super talent,” even though
“today maybe he is thinking something,
tomorrow he is thinking something to-
tally different.”) Recently, the brand upped
its already considerable horniness quo-
tient by sending, as part of the invitation
to its Milan fashion show, a butt plug
tucked inside an elegant tomato-red box.
Among Rosso’s goals is to advance
Diesel and its sister brands into the
metaverse. He has always loved tech-
nology. “I was the first company to bring
the fax to Italy,” he said. “The vision of
the company is modern, and me, I am
modern.” A new division of O.T.B., run
by one of Rosso’s sons, is in charge of
developing the business’s Web 3.0 capa-
bilities. Customers will be able to dress
an avatar in O.T.B. clothing for wear-
ing in virtual spaces.
“Renzo Rosso in the digital world
can be totally different from Renzo Rosso
in the real world,” he said. Spera indi-
cated that Rosso had his avatar already.
Asked what the avatar looked like,
he laughed and said, “It looks like me.”
—Naomi Fry
