//Window display for Impresario at the New Museum, Sept 16 – Nov 20, 1988. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

//Introduction to the show. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

My biography of the late Malcolm McLaren will now be published in April 2020, exactly 10 years after his premature death at the age of 64.

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Tags: Adam Ant, Art & Text, Catherine McGann, Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & The British New Wave, Keith Haring, Marcia Tucker, New Museum Of Contemporary Art, Paul Taylor, Vivienne Westwood, William Olander, Witches

Last night I gave a talk to fine art students at Central Saint Martins as part of the London art and design college’s Monday Guest Lecture series.

The title – Malcolm McLaren: A New Type Of Artist – stemmed from the catalogue  introduction by the late Paul Taylor to Impresario, the 1988 New York New Museum show he curated about McLaren’s activities.

Taylor wrote:

Clearly, Malcolm McLaren is a “bad guy” of contemporary pop culture, a reputation that in these times makes him all the more appealing. To many in the worlds of art and social criticism, however, McLaren is like a new type of artist. A “producer” in more than one sense of the word, he has literally orchestrated new musical events and created provocative “cultural texts” within the mass-media. He has also shown that art in the post-avant-garde era is a matter of synthesis, of combining elements from radically different sources. . . . McLaren is a populariser, which is to say that he is a pioneer.

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Tags: Bernini, Central Saint Martins, Emil Nolde, Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges, Fred Vermorel, Godard, John Hansard Gallery, Le Mepris, Lionel Bovier, Massaccio, Musical Paintings, New Museum Of Contemporary Art, Paul Cézanne, Paul Taylor, Shri Jagannatha, The Living Theatre, Truffaut