Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 14:26:42 -0400 To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> Subject: Lederman profile NY Times today Public Lives 8-17-01 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"[ Note from Matthew Gaylor: I suppose this is a good thing, but this is about the 4th or 5th Freematt's Alerts subscriber who has been profiled in the New York Times. ]
From: "Robert Lederman" <robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net> Subject: Lederman profile NY Times today Public Lives Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 06:39:33 -0400
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/nyregion/17PROF.html
NY Times August 17, 2001
PUBLIC LIVES
End Draws Near for Mayor's Artful Adversary
By ROBIN FINN
Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Robert Lederman
Evidently a first-rate muse is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Picasso had his mistresses. Warhol had a soup can. Robert Lederman, a canny street artist who has waged three federal lawsuits for his First Amendment rights to display his art and opinions in the public eye, has Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. But only for four more months.
Come December, Mr. Lederman, whose best- known works (caustic caricatures of a vampire- like mayor in dictatorial guise) hang outdoors on the sidewalks adjacent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than inside, will lose his muse of eight years to term limits.
What a mundane way to go. Mr. Lederman, with a group of 400 artists he has led since March 1998, successfully sued the city in State Supreme Court that August - after Mr. Giuliani tried to shrink their Met marketplace by issuing only 24 permits, imposing a monthly fee and arresting scofflaws. The latest chapter in street artists vs. Giuliani, a battle that Mr. Lederman claims has cost city taxpayers millions in legal fees, was decided Aug. 7 in United States District Court in Manhattan; again, the artists prevailed, and again, the city vowed to appeal.
"I'm using art as a weapon against a tyrant, and when this is all over, I'm probably going to have a hard time going back to making the nice picture to go over somebody's couch," says Mr. Lederman, 50, very much the bohemian in his paint-splashed sandals, T-shirt and shiny synthetic track pants that will never come close to running track. He has no time for hobbies; when he is not dashing off Giuliani caricatures in the oppressive clutter of his Brighton Beach studio or on the hood of his car, he is in court.
So he is not sure whether it pains or pleases him to soon lose a mayor whose visage has inspired a thousand paintings and earned him thousands in sales. Rudy postcards go for $1 apiece, Rudy posters for $10, and Rudy originals, except for the hundred or so Mr. Lederman says were confiscated by the Police Department acting on orders from his nemesis, command up to $1,000. Who buys them? Everybody. Tourists, lawyers, left-wing types, off-duty police officers, even fans of Mr. Giuliani (the artist's favorite customers because they're potential converts).
Speaking of the police, he is certain he won't miss those scary sleepovers in the Tombs after being arrested. But Mr. Lederman admits that he goes out of his way to attract the mayor's ire, often displaying his wares next to Mr. Giuliani's entrance at City Hall. The artist seems to share his muse's knack for self-aggrandizement. With a mix of spite and admiration, he calls Mr. Giuliani a public relations genius, but he is not so bad at playing the game himself. So what if his masterly works aren't in the Met. His art has appeared in People magazine three times; talk about exposure.
He says Mr. Giuliani has taken the bait and dispatched the police to arrest him 41 times, which does not include the hundred or so summonses that he has been issued since the mayor, as part of his quality-of-life campaign, tried to lump street artists with hot-dog vendors and squeegee wielders, and censor their squatter's rights to a niche in the urban landscape.
"It's been a war since 1994," says Mr. Lederman, slender and strident with a graying beard and a glib speaking manner. "He made it a war. I never sued anybody before Giuliani. I had no real interest in politicians. The ironic thing is that now, thanks to Giuliani, my art has been seen by half the world. I've got a cable show, a Web site, radio and TV spots, articles everywhere, and I've become a recognized expert on First Amendment rights. I've written my own court appeals. How did I learn to do all this? I went to Giuliani U."
In a crumbling Brighton Beach apartment crammed with Giuliani canvases and monster figurines, Mr. Lederman lives with his companion of eight years and their young son, both of whom he refuses to identify because of his having cultivated "a lot of enemies" during contretemps with Mr. Giuliani. He recollects being spit on, and being threatened by a man with a screwdriver who took exception to his art on a SoHo sidewalk in 1999. Altercations like this didn't happen back when he was homeless in the East Village in the 1980's selling street scenes and a self-published pamphlet of poems and woodcuts, "Urban Archtypes."
He says he was evicted from his previous home in Park Slope after taping a poster of Mr. Giuliani to a front window to protest malathion spraying during the 1999 mosquito scare - he contends that the spray gave him asthma, even blames it for the mayor's prostate cancer, and he is a litigant against the city in the No Spray Coalition. He marvels that his graduating class at Tilden High School in Brooklyn produced two such lively activists as himself and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
The Brooklyn-born Mr. Lederman was 12 when he sold his first art, portraits of movie stars, outside Dubrow's deli on Kings Highway; he used the proceeds to buy monster movies on 8-millimeter film (he wanted to be a director). His father, Paul, was a commercial artist whose unsigned work appeared everywhere from cigarette ads to Elvis posters; when Mr. Lederman left home at 17 to be a street artist, his father disapproved.
Mr. Lederman has long had dicey relations with authority figures. But he is saving all his Giuliani art, and not out of sentiment: "I figure he'll be back in 2005, just like Schwarzenegger."
Bush/Giuliani-Nazi connection, the CIA's Manhattan Institute, eugenics, West Nile Virus information
Street artist information
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net (718) 743-3722
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