Interview

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There's great irony in the fact that Rob Pruitt is the man putting together the Guggenheim’s First Annual Art Awards, a sort of tongue-and-cheek version of the Oscars for contemporary American art. It’s the kind of irony more befitting a Hollywood film script than the New York art scene. On October 29, before an assemblage of heavyweights in the Guggenheim Museum rotunda, faux-champagne-bottle-in-ice-bucket lamp awards will be doled out to the winners of Solo Show of the Year, Group Show of the Year, Curator of the Year, and Artist of the Year, among a myriad of other categories. While a committee helped select the nominees, the awards show itself was 45-year-old Pruitt’s brainchild—his way of giving back to the art-world community that has made him one of its own unorthodox, uninhibited stars.

In the late 1980s, the Washington, D.C.–raised Pruitt was, along with Jack Early, part of the collaborative art team Pruitt-Early, a duo that was instantly touted as a pair of intrepid, iconoclastic new­comers—that is, until a 1992 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, where the two artists paid tribute to black culture by splashing paint on foil, shrink-wrapping posters of famous African Americans, and supplying their own rap soundtrack. Today that kind of show wouldn’t read as much of a shock, let alone a scandal, but in the early ’90s, the culture was still fully entrenched in the dicta of political correctness. Protests ensued, their work was accused of being racist, and, soon after, the pair disbanded.

Summarily pushed out of the art world, Pruitt took several years to find his legs again. In 1998, at a group show at an artist’s studio in New York’s Meatpacking District, he presented Cocaine Buffet a minimalist line of cocaine that stretched 16 feet across the space, as a sort of peace offering to the art world (which greedily accepted). Since then, Pruitt has thrived—or rather sensationally rebuilt his rep­utation—largely on that same ability to shock. His glitter panda paintings, first shown in 2000, might be his most recognized pieces to date. But in the last few years, he has also transformed a Victorian house in upstate New York into a Goth art installation, fash­ioned giant character-driven tombstones for everyone from Anna Nicole Smith to Charles Schulz, and cre­ated a sweeping, diaristic mural out of 3,000 iPhoto photos. Actor James Franco recently caught up with Pruitt, who was tending to preparations for the Art Awards, to discuss the festivities—as well as the gray area between celebration and critique that Pruitt himself has explored throughout his own career.

JAMES FRANCO: It’s funny that we are doing this on the phone because we both live in New York City.

ROB PRUITT: I’m in Montauk. Where are you?

FRANCO: I’m in Asheville, North Carolina, near where Black Mountain College used to be. I’m here for a poetry program. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to come and stay at the hotel I’m in because his wife, Zelda, was in a nearby institution. So, tell me about the Art Awards at the Guggenheim.

PRUITT: The Guggenheim came to me and wanted to know if I had any ideas for reimagining their annual fundraiser because I guess it’s just basically been a gala ball for many years. I thought it would be a nice idea to have an art-world Oscars with different categories . . . It would basically follow the format of the Oscars as closely as we could and make it this super-entertaining parody. But I wanted it to have its own integrity as well, where we could do it year after year and the recipients would be proud for having won and would display their trophies on their mantels.

FRANCO: I guess England has the Turner Prize, so it’s not that crazy.

PRUITT: Yeah, it’s not completely off the wall.

FRANCO: So how did you pick the nominees?

PRUITT: We established a committee to come up with the nominees for the different categories. I don’t know at this point who’s going to win what. I’m just now in the midst of producing the show, finding hosts and presenters, and building a set.

FRANCO: Will there be live entertainment and per­formance art pieces or something?

PRUITT: Yeah, there will. Maybe we’ll ask Pharrell to perform. I’m not really sure. Do you think you would consider presenting an award?

FRANCO: I’d love to do that. But I do think it’s inter­esting that now you’re celebrating the art world after you’ve spent all of this time in your career fighting it. You’re in Montauk right now, but I know you used to have a house in upstate New York. I never saw it in person but it was something of an art piece itself, as I understand.

PRUITT: Yeah. We bought a dilapidated old Vic­torian house that sat high on a hill in this village in upstate New York called Fleischmanns. The town was sort of set up by Charles Fleischmann, the founder of the Fleischmann Company famous for its yeast, and his family had a couple big mansions and paid for the public parks. The town fell into disrepair over the past 80 years, and Jonathan Horowitz and I thought it would be really cool to buy this very prominent house and set it up as like a public art piece that could possibly help revitalize the village.