Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Matthew Strauss moves through the crowd like a distracted host, checking on the gin and tonics, greeting a young curator from Brooklyn, darting to the back room to crank up the music. He’s glad to see a video camera rolling and an intern snapping party pics of Linnea Spransy’s show, but he’s more than a little disconcerted to see me scribbling.
“A notebook in a gallery,” he mutters; there’s a sense of sacrilege, as though I’ve brought a vulgar parrot into a monastery. He hurries to explain the notebook to a clutch of guests: “She’s writing about all this,” he says with a vague wave.
“I’m doing a profile of Matt,” I correct.
“You could’ve let me say that.”
Caffeinated, he strides away to check on the intern assigned to count attendance. Eyes trained on the door, she’s clicking furiously. Only 8:30 p.m. and she’s up to 161; soon the crowd will be so thick, people will have to strain to see the work of this young, cerebral, out-of-town artist. Strauss raises an eyebrow. He had predicted a lower turnout.
“Oh, he never feels like he gets enough people,” chuckles Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti in my ear. “Matt’s very dissatisfied.” Bonetti thinks White Flag’s one of the best things to happen to art in St. Louis in years. He braves the spiral stairs to see the sculpture show in the library.
Strauss reappears. “I do have a piece of advice for you,” he announces. “If you want to get dirt on me, you’re going to have to do it without attribution. Because it would be suicide for anybody to—”
“I don’t know that there’s that much dirt to dig,” I tell him gently. “This is a profile, not an exposé.”
He looks disappointed. “I’d actually be kind of fascinated to read it.”
Matt Strauss has been fighting for art since he was 3, when his little brother, Andy, knocked down his block sculptures and splashed purple paint all over his paintings. Their mother, Mary Strauss of the Fox Theatre, can’t remember which kid she put in the playpen, but the purpose was to save Matt’s art from The Purple Dabbler.
Now Matt’s 35, and he’s using his nonprofit gallery to fight the “tenured mediocrity” of St. Louis’ commercial art galleries, detractors who knock him for being a rich kid and anybody who thinks Vegas is a good place to go. Argument is his adrenaline: He demands engagement, resents voyeurs, slams opinions into walls and hopes they ricochet.
Can he take the kind of criticism he hands out? “Maybe,” former intern Liz Wolfson says dubiously. “But he has to think you’re right.”
When Strauss opened White Flag, 18 months ago, it was like throwing a match on gasoline: Instantly, the gallery became the hottest, most explosive place in town. Doesn’t a white flag suggest peace? “No! It’s an international sign of surrender. Giving up not only on your own ideas about how you’re going to live your life but on other people doing things the way you would have them done.”
He started White Flag because—well, because the rest of the St. Louis art community wasn’t doing things the way he would have them done. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s Currents series was “hit or miss, with a lot of miss,” he says. “A lot of people have their hands tied behind their backs.” The edgy little Forum for Contemporary Art had become the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; all that gravitas and concrete had made it hard to feel the winds of change. And Washington University’s new Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum was “very serious, very academic. It’s got a German accent.”
Commercial galleries dominated the scene, Strauss continues, and because they had to sell to stay open—“and what you can sell here is very limited and very parochial”—St. Louisans had no way to see provocative new work. “Galleries know that edgy, relevant contemporary art is not going to sell here, so they buy what will sell, which is generally conservative, irrelevant, locally produced. The question, to me, which is slowly being answered in the experiment here—” He sits forward, excited. “What if movie theaters in St. Louis were only allowed to show the worst movies being made? Eventually no one would go to the movies anymore. That’s synonymous with what’s been going on in the galleries. It is socially acceptable for an 18-year-old kid to take a date to the art museum and walk around the mummies and armor. It is not socially acceptable to go to a gallery. Now, if you start showing good movies …”
You draw a crowd, as White Flag has. Many are under 30—but not all. A 55-year-old neurosurgeon recently flew here from Oregon and asked how to find this gallery called White Flag; he’d been told he just had to go there.
White Flag’s name suggests that it’s completing a trilogy, placing itself alongside White Columns in New York and White Cube in London. Some White Flag exhibits travel here from New York and London; others have catapulted lesser-known artists into those markets. Strauss’ mailing list concentrates on the coasts, not on St. Louis. It’s here, though, that he’s waking sleeping dogs, nudging them away from the hearth, risking their snarls.
“Matt’s the only person I know who walks in both worlds: the scrappy, young, punk rock, grassroots art culture and the rarefied Contemporary/Pulitzer/Grand Center world,” an insider says. “He’s one of the few in town who are really cross-pollinating those worlds, which needs to happen.”
And probably wouldn’t, without a fight.
“Ever since he was born, Matt was his own person,” Mary Strauss says with a sigh. “He always had very strong ideas.”
His first memory of going somewhere with his mother is of her Martha Rounds exercise class: “I took a sketchbook. I didn’t know how to draw crotches, though. The leotards—there was something superheroic about it, the contrasting leotard/underwear situation.”
He was 3 at the time.
The Strauss boys—Matt, younger brother Andy and older half-brother Adam—grew up with “a large measure of freedom and a lot of chances to get into trouble,” Matt says. “We’d do things on the third floor; our parents could be in the house and have no idea. It takes a lot of fear out of a young person.”
When he was 10, his parents bought the Fox Theater, and he spent hours backstage: “My mother would be walking around with her briefcase, and I’d be walking around with my Star Wars action figures—in a briefcase.” He hated school. “I wasn’t bored because it was too easy; I was bored because it was insane to me. All my early report cards say, ‘Matthew talks too much in class and needs to stop drawing.’” When it came time to apply to John Burroughs, he says his parents made one of their only mistakes and “let me blow the entrance interview on purpose.”
“We didn’t let him blow it,” Mary says, venting fond exasperation. “He flunked it on purpose, told the interviewer he didn’t really want to be there, it was his parents’ idea.”
Matt wound up with his punked-out friends at Crossroads, just as he’d planned. Later he transferred to Clayton High but still didn’t, as they say, “apply himself.” His mother knew he was bright—maybe too bright, “always overthinking.” Matt had his own moment of doubt, though, after bouncing through three universities and landing at Webster University: “I remember disagreeing so violently with everyone around me, on everything they were talking about, and I thought, ‘Maybe I am stupid! What are the chances I’m the only one in this room who is right?’ I was so concerned I went out and got my IQ tested.”
The score reassured him. And by then, a class with novelist T.M. McNally had finally struck a spark. “Matt was frustrated,” recalls McNally’s wife, poet Sally Ball. “He was smart enough that he should have been at an elite institution—but he hadn’t worked hard enough to get there. When he met my husband, all of a sudden there was somebody that he couldn’t run circles around.”
“His intelligence is blistering; his gaze unflinching,” McNally says now. “That’s why he’s so smart: because he’s so honest.” McNally recommended Strauss for an internship at Washington University’s International Writers Center, where Sally then worked, and she introduced him to a shy young woman whom he promptly—briefly—married. Accepted by three graduate programs in creative writing, he went to his family’s Sanibel Island time share, sat on the beach and had the inevitable epiphany: He loved making objects and hated sitting down to write. “I can endure the disappointment of people,” he told himself.
Disappointment might be a little dramatic: “I’d known ever since he was 2 that he would be doing something with art,” Mary says. “He fought it for years. I kept thinking, ‘What is he doing in creative writing?’ But you have to let people find themselves.”
Strauss couldn’t face art school (“All those kids working in very close proximity, with the constant look over the shoulder and someone yelling at you publicly every two weeks”), so he apprenticed himself to an old family friend, sculptor Ernest Trova. In the beginning, Strauss shook with excitement just to get to switch out the numbered prints as Trova signed them. Over time, a real friendship developed. Meanwhile, Strauss read hundreds of art-history books, looked, compared and probed, honing his critical faculties to murderous sharpness.
Soon he couldn’t work without constantly asking himself if what he was doing was good enough. “I’m crippled by my editing,” he confesses, fingers wrapped around a Coke. “I’m unwilling to let anything out of my studio that I could not spend an hour and a half defending against the most withering criticism.”
The work he did release won acclaim—but never sold much. Meanwhile, after years of being lazy because he was bored, Strauss had become passionate and disciplined—and was working within an arts community he found both lazy and boring. White Flag was his way to see if there was hope. “If you do the most relevant shows you can do, for the least amount of money, in a beautiful facility that will stand up anywhere in the world, and you still can’t make it work,” he says, “then you don’t have to think about it anymore.”
On New Year’s Eve, bonfires blazed outside White Flag. Inside, a mechanical bull stood smack in the middle of the gallery, “weaponized,” and a film projector unspooled Kim Jong Il across the faces of guests competing in a Dr. Strangelove “Ride the Bomb” contest. Some wore beards plucked from the Wall of Dictatorial Facial Hair; nearly all had drunk from the Lenin’s Tomb Open Ice Bar. The theme came from artist Juan William Chávez’s Communist imagery, and the party drew 298 young guests, many of whom stayed past 3 a.m.
“It went brilliantly—beyond my expectations,” Strauss says. “The goal with all these White Flag parties is to illustrate a larger idea about making an art environment that’s not lame, that’s legitimately compelling. To not play the ‘Well, it’s good for St. Louis’ card. To give creative, sophisticated people an option.
“There’s this unspoken culture war amongst the under-40s between the intellectual creatives and the superficials,” he remarks. “I know a whole group of people who don’t go tanning and who have more compelling interests than what clothes a celebrity is wearing. This was still very much a party, there was nothing tied down about it—but there was no plastic surgery in the house.”
Asked for the names of a few people who know him really well, Strauss emails a list of colleagues prefaced by a warning: “People who know me well are few.” Those in his outer circle usually name Juan William Chávez, artist/director of Boots Contemporary Art Space, as his closest buddy—but according to Chávez, he and Strauss are “more colleagues than friends. We just talk; we don’t go have beers together or anything like that. Our game faces are on.
“Matt’s criticism and his honesty are the most interesting things about him,” Chávez remarks. “We’ll be at a meeting with museum people, and he’s going for the jugular, saying, ‘It’s a catastrophe. It’s crap.’”
The one man who does know Strauss is Trova, who says, “He’s a very high-minded young man. People don’t realize how serious he is. I don’t know anything he can’t do.”
“Caustic, fast, fierce: yes,” emails Ball. “Also generous, also loyal.” On the phone, she hesitates to say more. “He’s unknown by choice. I do want to honor that.”
Friends offer “protective shell” clichés, but Strauss seems more of an armadillo than an oyster, forging ahead, a thick plating covering the tender parts. He says he grew the armor watching his father, developer Leon Strauss: “Once I came out of Glaser Drug in the Central West End, and somebody asked me to sign a petition, and it was against my dad! Everything he ever did was met with skepticism and derision, but it just kept working out, and his successes were larger and larger.” Matt pauses. “Anything you do, people just come after you. People you have never met, never spoken a word to, and they hate you.” Suddenly I realize he’s talking about himself, not his dad.
“I know for a fact how many people hate everything about me personally and express it loudly and publicly,” he continues. “They are upset that my family’s background is what it is—there’s a lot of insecurity here. A week does not go by where I don’t hear some tale of how much person X hates me. When I won Great Rivers [Biennial art competition, in 2006], my assistant was at a bar and heard two girls talking about ‘this asshole Matt Strauss’ and how I had undeservedly won Great Rivers.” He pauses. “People always talk about the inferiority complex in St. Louis, but is it a complex if it’s actually coming out of inferiority?” Oh boy, I think involuntarily. He didn’t win any of ’em back with that one.
“Matt is totally willing to be the guy that everyone hates,” Wolfson remarks. “He is the master of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But he’s not cruel. No matter what maybe other people would say, Matt Strauss is not a cruel person. He does not suffer fools lightly; it all boils down to that. If you do something that is not up to the Matt Strauss standard, he’s going to say, ‘Hey, that thing you did, that sucked,’ or, ‘That was stupid, what were you thinking?’ And we’re all better for it.”
The armor, and the busyness, and the brooding quest (Post critic Bonetti once remarked that Strauss’ work “doesn’t seem much interested in life; it is obsessed, rather, by art”) keep Strauss’ friends at arm’s length. There’s something fundamentally solitary about him, self-absorbed in a Woody Allen sort of way. And while he loves his brothers, he says he’s spent 35 years trying to figure out how they can be such polar opposites of him. “We don’t go out for drinks or anything,” he says. “We have almost nothing in common.”
Andy cheerfully agrees. He says he’s more like their older half-brother, who was adopted. Matt’s the driven one, “and he’s very secretive,” Andy says. “He lets you know only what he wants you to know.”
Even for the parents he adored, Matt uses oddly remote words, saying they were “very thoughtful” and describing his father as “a very pragmatic and generous guy.”
“He always seemed a little apologetic about his age,” Matt continues. “He was having heart attacks when I was 8. But on the positive side, you got a very sage, accomplished guy. He was getting things done the whole time.”
Strauss money funds White Flag, and for every detractor who dismisses it as a rich-boy hobby, 50 art lovers snap back that Matt’s doing this for St. Louis, gratis, and pouring every ounce of his energy into it, not tossing back martinis and jetting off to the Riviera.
“We need $100,000 a year to keep going—our 15 exhibitions and four special events cost less than many museums spend on a single exhibit,” he notes. “This is supposed to be the last year of 100 percent Strauss money making it go, and every time I’ve got a minute to breathe, I remember, ‘Oh, I’ve really got to start that fundraising.’” But then he remembers he has to find monofilament to float Spransy’s work in midair and write the manifesto for the Contemporary exhibit and fill out paperwork for the state and design the new postcards and commission a curator and get the floor cleaned. “Development is never going to be the top of the list until we are out of business,” he admits. “Everything here is in a constant state of hair on fire—we have no paid employees; it’s me and a bunch of volunteers.”
Does he at least chill out at family barbecues? “He grills a great steak,” offers Andy. “Once he was late, so I started the meat, and he came in yelling, ‘Don’t touch the meat!’” What relaxes him? “Drinking Scotch, and the pool. He just gets really mellow.” Andy waits a beat. “Then he turns into even more of a smartass.”
Strauss is vulnerable in only two spots: his art, which is far too serious and original to ever be perceived as a weakness, and his interactions with women. “I’ve been told I’ve got no game,” he says wryly. He hasn’t had a serious relationship since he started White Flag, and although he says he’s deeply eager to marry and have kids, he’s not even dating. This, he blames on St. Louis. “It’s some kind of weird wilderness. Very few people with the kind of interests and priorities I have are inclined to stay here. It used to be kind of funny: You go anywhere else, and it’s one interesting eligible person after another.” He looks off into the distance. “It gets less funny.”
He spins a Dr. Pepper between his palms. “It’s also me. Something clicked at some point where casual just screwing around became less interesting. You sense the window—I mean, I don’t think 35’s old, but to a 26-year-old grad student, you’re pretty old. I’m just saying, when I have experimented with a large age discrepancy, it has become uncomfortably paternal. You are telling them to floss their teeth.”
Wolfson says Strauss turns “boyish, a little awkward” with a woman he likes, and his finesse dissolves. “He can totally have the ball and then just drop it, spectacularly.”
What about that early, brief marriage? “It was kind of Las Vegas, without any of the interest,” he says. “What was that? Man, I don’t know. It wasn’t terribly healthy, I can tell you that.”
“It was an opposites-attract sort of thing,” says Lorin Cuoco, associate director of the International Writers Center when the couple met. “She was shy, although I knew she was interested in him—you can tell these things—and he kept trying to make her laugh.”
Still, Cuoco was surprised they married. She hopes Matt chooses somebody a little more forceful the next time, “somebody who’s going to call him on his stuff.”
When Strauss looks at art, the plated armor falls away, the feverish cerebral activity cools and the rhetoric subsides. One observer calls him “a truffle pig,” able to sniff out the best new talent instinctively. He makes very few mistakes. He launched White Flag with a show by Bill Smith, a biologist who creates intricate, fragile kinetic sculptures from bits of leaf and wire and brings them alive with rare earth magnets and wind currents. Smith had pretty much given up on exhibiting in St. Louis. After the White Flag show, a New York gallery picked him up, and suddenly works that nobody in St. Louis would buy for $3,000 were selling for $60,000.
“If you want to be taken seriously, you are supposed to show established artists—Maya Lin, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman,” Strauss says. “My idea is that when you read our schedule, you have no idea who anyone is. Discovery. Edited, filtered discovery.” Even if you hate what you see, he adds, you’ve had “the valuable experience that’s not incredibly common in this town of learning about artists without any preexisting notions of their work. Not knowing what you are going to get is part of the fun.”
There is, of course, an inevitable overlap between what is new and what is shocking. Does Strauss ever worry that he is shocking just for shock’s sake? “It’s never too much,” he answers instantly. “There is no ‘too much’ anymore. The vulgarities of the media make anything in an art gallery pale.
“There is a value in what is novel and what is visceral,” he continues, “and I value both of those things more highly than perhaps another person would. But I don’t think we have ever shocked anybody at White Flag. Some giggles, maybe. There was a guy who shaved his testicles and put the hair in a bowl and pulled some underwear out of a cooked chicken. I think everyone here was fairly amused. Nudity’s kind of played out. Testicles are kind of old. The hot tubs in the gallery, the horse in the gallery—those were all just easy rentals.”
How would he compare what he does at White Flag with what, say, his mother does at the Fox? “The difference between a priest and a pimp?” he shoots back. “The Fox is a business. White Flag is a noble experiment, and a very unprofitable one.”
Linnea Spransy kneels on the cold floor of White Flag, cleaning frosted Mylar with acetone. Against the wall leans a canvas, its elegant, cosmic precision born from what she insists is an “achingly simple” mathematical formula. She used to stop there; lately, she’s taken to turning up her stereo and splattering paint across her pieces’ perfect lines. “I’m interested in the intersection of art and theology; in fate and free will,” she confides while Strauss is out getting lunch. “Is the future something that can be known? In my own Tinkertoy way, I’m trying to play with an idea far too huge for me to contain, picking off a little piece at a time.”
These two couldn’t be more different. Spransy doesn’t agonize over her own limitations; she finds them freeing, making rules for herself just to see where they’ll take her. Fascinated by mystery, she doesn’t pretend to understand how she reaches the end result, but she finds it hopeful. Strauss—a mix of cynicism, high energy and boundless possibility—refuses mystery, dwells on futility, lives to break the rules.
And just as I’m thinking that, he returns, Coke in one hand and a sack in the other, and starts mapping what goes where. Spransy asks artist Brandon Anschultz, who helps with the installations, whether to spray-paint the clips black, so they vanish against the gallery’s black steel beams. Strauss interrupts, saying he doesn’t think it’s important to paint them, and the discussion ends there.
“Linnea’s interesting,” he says later. “No one could look at her work and not believe that some greater logic was involved. There’s an inarguable honesty to it, a genuine novelty.
“When I was making canvases, they were strictly anti-paintings,” he adds. “They were about how you can’t paint anymore.”
“Do you really believe that?” I ask.
“I was willing to argue it.”
Indifferent to the theology in Spransy’s work, he keeps talking about “her perverse sense of color” and how fresh her abstractions are. Is he convinced there’s no God? “Yeah, I positively believe that there is nothing and it’s a terrible, empty experience.” He laughs, high and loud. “I’m a very scientific, rational person. I believe in the rules of evidence. But I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t.”
Has he had any foxhole moments, when he believed in spite of himself? He looks away. “The closest would be my father’s prolonged death, those horrific months of incredibly drawn-out suffering. I do remember thinking, as my father was taking his last breaths, that there was something very real about the moment before someone is dead and the moment after they are dead. Even when someone is comatose, there is that, and then there is nothing. And it was real as hell.”
After his father’s death, he spent several years painting ghosts. Then he made a series of massive silk-screens: a triptych of an animal pelt close-up, a portrait of his father just after he died, a series of life-size wheelchairs.
“After Leon died, Matt’s work was dark and terrifying,” his mother says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait till he works this one out.’”
The melancholy streak wasn’t new, though: When Matt was a kid, she says, “We’d go to Florida, and he’d call and say, ‘I just want you to know, we had a frost, and all your daffodils are dead.’” Now she teases him for being an old man, wrapped up in his work and loath to travel, a curmudgeon already.
Matt uses the word “encouraging” as high praise—but his work’s all about futility. The sexual futility of biker babes in humiliating photographs. A series of silk-screens, made with paint, of photographs of images of paint made with layers of paint, that he maintained were arguably not paintings. When he won the Great Rivers Biennial 2006, his show at the Contemporary was called “Dead Language”; one of his points was that painting had lost its ability to communicate. The work presented complicated, cynical ideas in black and white, on giant canvases that demanded your attention. Its messages were described by the museum as “dark, mysterious and occasionally bitingly funny.” A lot like their creator.
Yet his gallery is white, and feels hopeful. So, in the end, is he a cynic or an optimist? “Yeah, I’m trying to figure that out too,” he says. “The thing is, White Flag wasn’t founded on a presumption of success. It’s an experiment. For a while I wasn’t even rooting for it to succeed.”
While Strauss and Spransy prepare to hang the show (with unpainted clips), a tall young woman carefully positions face masks of Lenin on a table in the back room and slaps them. Once intended to be Strauss’ studio, the room is currently occupied by a squad of interns, moonlike crater formations, a dozen half-empty Starbucks cups, two leather wingback chairs and several totems, including a wind-up bunny that Jim Schmidt, owner of Schmidt Contemporary Art, gave him after a Post-Dispatch review called Strauss the Energizer bunny of the art world.
I remark that the Strauss persona is not exactly bunnyesque. “No, it’s not,” he agrees. “This guy is more like it.” He reaches for a slumped terra-cotta figure titled “Portrait of Anxiety/Depression,” ca. 800 BCE.
Then he opens the door and calls the stray cat that’s adopted White Flag, an orange cat he christened Whitey. “Whitey boy! C’mere, son!’” he yells in a high, countryish, old man’s cackle. Spransy arches an eyebrow.
“I just think it’s important that when you are talking to an animal, you speak in a different voice, so the animal knows you are talking to it,” he says, earnest as a 4-year-old. Then he breaks away to escort a crate of art, London-bound, to the delivery truck, and for an instant his figure is silhouetted against the giant, translucent red-and-yellow New Year’s Eve banner still hanging over the garage entrance. Spransy smiles. “You ever think art is a strange form of show business?”
What has running White Flag done to Matt’s own work? “It’s destroyed it,” he says instantly. “It hasn’t killed it completely, but it’s laying on the ground twitching.”
He did manage, when Chávez invited him to exhibit at Boots, to fill a boat with 700 ounces of honey dripping from fishhooks. He’d gotten intrigued by primitive belief systems in which objects “worked” in some superstitious way, and the boat was a sexual fetish object: “People were to bring pictures of people they were interested in sexually and then dip them in the honey and throw them on the boat.”
There’s another piece, one he hasn’t shown anyone yet. “My mom used to be an exotic dancer and a waitress in a Playboy Club, and I know my dad tried some LSD. I took those two bits of family lore and made this piece with all these Playboy centerfolds, nine of them starting with the month I was conceived. I put a single hit of … a chemical substance on each one and then a hole in the glass of the frame,” inviting the viewer to … er … experience the work. “It’s very much about where you are from,” he says. “I had to gestate while men were leering at this woman. It’s about conception and birth and intercourse and levels of consciousness.”
In December, Strauss confides details of his next opening, the February inaugural show for the new Front Room gallery at the Contemporary: “Everything in the White Flag P.G.S.—Provincial Gallery Simulator—will be fake art that either says, ‘Your taste is our problem’ or, ‘Our taste is your problem.’ And the gallery girl will take a picture of someone else slapping you in the face. If you are a gallery-goer, you get slapped for free. If you are a collector, you pay a small fee and take home a souvenir of your abuse. And if you are a major collector, you can negotiate for multiple slaps.”
Isn’t he afraid he’s coming a little too close to the punishment many people feel contemporary art already inflicts? “That’s not not in there,” he says, and grins. “It’s also a really easy show to accomplish without a budget.”
By January, when it’s time to draft the manifesto, the breeziness has vanished. He rubs his eyes and peers again at his computer screen. “I want it to be less vicious, less prosecutorial, more sympathetic and solution-oriented. And inarguable, so even the gallery owners say, ‘That’s true.’ I want it to be open to discussion, not Mussolini shouting from the balcony. Because this is something I’m going to personally answer for.”
Two days before the manifesto is due at the printer, Strauss convenes a group of people he respects. All he wants to do is “tweak the sentences a bit”—and instead the whole idea goes off the rails. “The consensus,” he says later, “was that while it may have been all or almost completely true, it was a terrible idea to use it, because it was going to cause so much strife. I came out of there with my mind blown. I think the piece is funny, and there was not a single chuckle in the room.”
He went home and compromised, turning his declarations into questions. More than 1,300 people showed up for the opening. Some muttered that he was an asshole, that he over-generalized, that the concept was juvenile. But hundreds lined up to get slapped. “The thing at the Contemporary was gangbusters,” Strauss emailed, “much more successful as an event than I could have possibly imagined.”
Tired of Monopoly? Bring up Matt Strauss’ name, and if it’s praised, casually repeat one of his opinions. Gallery owner and artist Philip Slein listens to Matt’s quotes about commercial galleries and drawls, “He didn’t seem frustrated when I was paying him for the sale of his painting.” Gallery owner Jim Schmidt, reminded that Strauss says anything salable in St. Louis is likely to be conservative and irrelevant, stiffens. “‘Irrelevant’ comes from your own perspective,” he says. “Matt is more than welcome to use whatever terminology he wants.”
“There aren’t a lot of shades of gray with Matthew,” his mother says, sounding amused, proud and genuinely worried. “He does use me as a sounding board, and I’m glad. He does have to live in St. Louis.”
At least, he seems to want to. He was urged to move to New York for his art; no dice. His mother compares him to a tree: “stuck in the ground here, and you can’t move him.” He lives in an old firehouse downtown, in a space that’s cool without being cold, relaxed without being cozy. Art dominates—this could be a gallery—and conversation resonates, amplified by huge white rooms. Everywhere you look there’s a visual jolt: a giant close-up of a kid’s smile, black with squid; a hundred other moments of tenderness, revulsion or impolite candor, goading you to respond.
Art can change us. He’s sure of it.
