On the other hand, I painted a "lemon" in January 1984, in the driveway of my parents' house in Whittier, Ca. It was a 6 x 4 foot painting of two dinosaurs wearing party hats, called Enasaurs, which was named both after my brother, Paul Kostabi, who is known in the punk rock music world as "Ena," and after the painter Ena Swansea, who used to wear a bracelet like the one I painted on one of the dinosaurs.

I couldn't sell Enasaurs at my January 1984 one-person show at the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles. Nor could I sell it later in New York at the Hal Bromm Gallery or at Semaphore. I might have destroyed it as unsaleable lemon, but I personally liked it and it had sentimental value. How can you destroy a painting dedicated to your brother?

A few years passed and suddenly Warhol's printmaker, Donald Sheridan, insisted on making an edition of serigraphs of the image. The serigraphs sold out instantly, including one to the Brooklyn Museum. Then Fotofolio, the respected art postcard publisher, asked me to if it could make a postcard of it, along with five other Kostabi images. The Enasaurs postcard sold the best by far. Then a Chicago based t-shirt company made and sold tons of Enasaurs t-shirts.

The ultimate triumph was when the Ramones used a digitally altered version (cowboy hats instead of party hats) of Enasaurs for their final album cover, Adios Amigos. I entered rock 'n' roll history with a painting that no one would buy. (As a curious side note, the painting is still wet. The alizarin crimson paint, for some reason, just won't dry, after almost 20 years. Maybe a conservator can e-mail an explanation.)

My theory for its unsaleability as a painting, despite its popularity as an image, is that most adults don't want to put a brightly colored, 6 x 4 foot painting of dinosaurs in their living room, whereas kids who can't afford paintings, but can afford postcards, t-shirts and albums, will snap it up. I imagine the prints were bought by adults who put them in their kids' rooms.

My advice for you is to first ask yourself if you really love the lemon. If you do, keep it. If you're not sure, ask a committee of many people whom you trust (include Donald Sheridan if possible) for their opinion of what might be wrong with the piece. Their reactions might inspire you in how to rework it. If they say it's not worth the bother, I recommend a box cutter and make sure you dispose of the fragments in separate trashcans in different locations so that certain hungry collectors can't dig through your trash and sew together the pieces. I knew a prominent Minimalist art collector in the '80s who told me with pleasure how he dug through Schnabel's trash looking for treasure. Basquiat's dumpster was frequently visited by shameless collectors too.


Dear Mark,
How important is quality as an ingredient for salability? It seems like so much bad art gets sold at galleries while truly great, intellectually stimulating work goes back to collect dust in an artist's storage. It seems like everything is measured by the bottom line: If an artist doesn't sell, he or she will experience a dealer's "benign neglect" or simply be dropped by the gallery, with the last communication being a trucker's bill for the return of their work, while artists who can't even spell "Bottino" end up there for glamorous dinners, where they network themselves into the next show.