How David Bowie and I hoaxed the world
Jo Hale/ Getty Images
The awful news of David Bowie’s shocking and untimely death made me take out my journal and search for the first time I met him. It turned out to be on 22 February 1994 at an editorial-board dinner for the art magazine Modern Painters. Here’s what I wrote:
“Modern Painters dinner tonight at The Ivy – about a dozen people includingDavid Bowie. I had numerous conversations with Bowie. He doesn’t drink but he smoked a lot, though. He was nice but a bit ill-at-ease. Mind you, he must have been nervous at that gathering – I was – the usual crowd of academics and art critics. It’s a small world and these types are completely caught up in it. Someone told me that Bowie wanted to bring a friend, for protection, but in the end he didn’t. He had a small goatee. Up close, his face looked quite lined, baggy-eyed. He’s painfully thin – he’s almost 50, now. When I think back to university and how often we played those early albums … Funny old world.”
This is when you realise journals are worth keeping. Bowie loved the art world. He was an autodidact intellectual, an avid and voracious reader, I later learned, as I came to know him a bit better. Looking back at my journal entry also made me think of Paul Klee – another artist and autodidact intellectual – and the concept that Klee evolved of “loose continuity”.
For Klee, loose continuity explained a curious facet of our lives – elucidating those vague patterns, random encounters and tangential connections that are only revealed in hindsight after a long passage of time – a kind of chronological version of six degrees of separation, I suppose.
And my journal was accurate: in 1971, in my horrible room in my horrible student flat, I listened and relistened to Bowie’s album Hunky Dory in a mesmerised trance. If people had told me I would get to know him (a little bit) I would have laughed loudly in their faces. Then the loose continuity kicked in when I was asked to join the editorial board of Modern Painters and I found myself sitting beside him – curious but not overwhelmed, evidently – keenly scrutinising this other latest recruit to the masthead.
At subsequent ed-board dinners we used to seek each other out because we were the new boys and over the next few years I saw quite a lot of him, a casual acquaintance that grew more close and intriguing when he became my publisher. Bowie had formed a small publishing company called 21 in order to publish art books and, in 1998, 21 published my fake biography Nat Tate: an American Artist 1928-1960 with the jacket blurb written by Bowie.
Bowie’s life as an editor, art critic and writer for Modern Painters, artist, collector, publisher (and hoaxer) has inevitably taken second place to his astonishing renown and achievement as musician and global cultural icon but it was very important to him, I believe, and he relished the fact that his occupancy of these other roles had little to do with his global fame and star power.
He was a genial and unassuming presence at the regular Modern Painters editorial meetings and when, in one of them, I suggested the idea of creating a fictional artist it was Bowie who said that the concept would work far more efficiently if it were published as a book.
And so it came to be. I invented a dead American “artist” I called Nat Tate and wrote his biography. Then the team at Modern Painters and 21 transformed the text into a small, beautifully made and copiously illustrated artist’s monograph. However, there’s absolutely no denying the fact that it was Bowie’s participation in the eventual hoax that gave it media heft.
Jo Hale/ Getty Images
He published the book, he organised the launch party (on April Fool’s Day, 1998) in Jeff Koons’s studio in Manhattan – Koons was a friend of Bowie – and it was Bowie who read out extracts of the book, absolutely deadpan, to the assembled New York glitterati. The clincher was his statement in the blurb that he was convinced that, “The small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist’s most profound dread – that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist – did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate.” Who wouldn’t be swayed by that eloquent testimonial?
When Modern Painters was sold in 2001 almost the entire editorial board was summarily removed by the new owner – including me and, mind-bogglingly, David Bowie. The end of the old Modern Painters marked the end of our regular contacts though we continued to communicate as the reverberations of the Nat Tate hoax carried on exponentially and I would routinely send him the foreign editions of the book he had published.
The decade of our loose continuity connections ended in New York shortly before Bowie’s 60th birthday. It was at a party in a Tribeca hotel. As I arrived I saw Bowie stepping out of a yellow cab and paying the driver. Greeting him and vaguely surprised to see him in this form of transport I asked him if he ever had any problems moving around the city. Not at all, he said, he happily used cabs and subways. “I just carry one of these,” he said, and held up a Greek newspaper. People think: that’s David Bowie, surely? Then they see the Greek newspaper – no, can’t be, just some Greek guy who looks like him.
It was a brilliant idea, I thought. So simple, so efficient – and somehow effortlessly cool and stylish: an act both quotidian and bravura, entirely typical of this fascinating man. So we can add another category to the long list of achievements that Bowie carried off so memorably and with such unique poise and brio. Not just an unforgettable songwriter, performer and musician but also an actor, an artist, a writer, a publisher, a shrewd financial operator and – it turns out (though we shouldn’t be at all surprised) – a master of disguise.
NOW WATCH: Something unprecedented is happening in the Pacific, and Hawaii could be in big trouble