I was going to write about the publication of yet another Ray Johnson book, an indication that this most unknown American artist continues to find his way into the golden halls of art world heaven following his watery suicide death back in 1995 in Sag Harbor, NY. The newest tome, A Book About Ray by Ellen Levy (The MIT Press, 2024), weighs in at 392 pages, with dozens of illustrations of his seminal collage works, documentary photographs and a full, expansive index. This one, like a handful of recent books, is a continuation of his ascent. Levy’s got me to obsess about finally finding an affordable copy of Johnson’s first book, The Paper Snake (Something Else Press, 1965), Fluxus-artist Dick Higgins’s publishing company. But… something else came up.*
That something else was simply, being sidetracked by the January 20th enthroning of Donald Trump.
“Throne” is an apt metaphor for what just took place in Washington D.C. It wasn’t remarkable for the spectacle in the Capitol, but for the shift in the verbal propaganda used on that frigid Monday. The not-terribly subtle transition from “American Carnage” in Trump’s 2017 inaugural speech to this edition’s “Golden Age” slogan was hard to miss; perhaps it was just another thinly disguised con promoting more Bitcoin-type productions set to launch by the transactional, felonious American leader? Undoubtedly. Days prior, Trump (and his wife) unleashed digital currencies that vacuumed up a few billion for him and in effect fleecing his followers. Indeed, the new president proclaimed a new golden age for America–for himself and Elon Musk.
“Golden Age” is not that curious a metaphor for Trump, because he has long aligned his brand with gold and its alluring sparkle. His toilets are famously gold-plated. The logo on his New York City Tower is gold plated. He raved about “liquid gold” in his Jan 20 speech, and his cult-like followers have long erected gold-colored statues of him, along with memes in golden hues. His for-sale sneakers are gold – and yes, curiously people buy them. Trump’s a serious consumer of fast food from the Golden Arches, McDonald’s — perhaps he enjoys seeing his name embedded in the brand? Trump seems to believe that by saturating objects (and ideas) in gold colors, they will appeal to the DNA of the American soul, that is, an inborn unquenchable thirst for wealth and power.
The Golden Age, too, is a metaphor for an America that grew into its big boy pants and filled those pants with coins. But there were several “golden ages.” Was it the Golden Age in the 1920s when Americans were so rich and modern they burst their britches and enabled the 1929 depression? That jazz age ending reduced US GDP by 15 percent, with 25 percent of the American labor force going unemployed. The Great Depression was so persistent a menace that men, women and children were turned into street urchins and dirt farmers; political upheaval in Europe of similar straits led to World War II (which effectively ended the Great Depression). That era gave us the mayhem and stunningly beautiful incoherence of Dada and Surrealism as aesthetic responses to political and economic chaos.
But maybe Trump was referring to a return of the postwar 1950s Golden Age, when American industry dominated the planet with its televisions, radios, and refrigerators; Hollywood and the wild success – and export – of Abstract Expressionism? That particular art movement led by a handful of immigrant intellectuals and a couple of boozed-up Americans was surely a sign of a golden age – the search for visual counterparts to consciousness and emotion, and internal personal conflict; it was when American supremacy set the table for the cultural, intellectual, and military world order.
Perhaps Trump misspoke and really meant a return to “The Gilded Age” (not the television series). That was a time that lasted just short of a generation, from 1870 to 1890, and when Friedrich Trump, Donald’s grandfather was born in Bavaria and made his way as an immigrant to the United States to seek his fortune and evade conscription in Germany.
The Gilded Age was marked by expansive industrialization and prodigious wealth accumulation (think Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and the JP Morgan clan, known collectively as the Robber Barons). There was massive immigration into the US, the rise of wages for ordinary workers, and also widespread poverty, government corruption, and increasing wealth disparity. The richest two percent of Americans owned a third of the country’s wealth.
Sound familiar?
The Gilded Age was a moment when, post-Civil War, those in power successfully influenced the government to benefit themselves. American artists at that time were busy loading their luggage and paints onto boats headed to France for study in Giverny, where Monet had set up his Impressionist monarchy.
Worth noting is the Renoir painting Trump claims to own (gold frames, of course), is fake, and the original has been in the Chicago Institute of Art for… 80 years–since that other golden age, The Great Depression, 1933. The Renoir in question is Two Sisters (On The Terrace), 1881. Look it up.
Those years gave us American Impressionists like Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and John Singer Sargent. The Gilded Age also gave us Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Black realist painter of the same generation, who studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and only earned his recognition in America after spending years in France.
That fin de siècle vibe was largely hopeful, adoring, colorful and unashamedly a dolled-up version of nature, intensely beautiful and formalistically a breakthrough in picture plane painting, but no serious social portrait of the era.
Maybe Trump was referring to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s—the golden age of the explosion of AIDS, and tax cuts, considerable expansion of the military-industrial complex, and an equally considerable contraction of federal regulations. A handsome tone-deaf slumber overtook the country and the City on the Hill seemed to shine in Reagan’s America. While Mikhail Gorbachev did “take down that wall,” and the Soviet Union did collapse in a rusty pile of propaganda, hundreds of Russian artists found their way to New York to join in the art world’s capitalist end-of-the-century orgy of art movements (Neo Geo, Neo Expressionism, Appropriation, Graffiti, among others) and conspicuous consumption, big money and increasing wealth disparity, and of course, the crack epidemic. Needless to say, money followed it all, which, in these transactional times, seems to be the feature, not the bug. Keith Haring’s 1984 “Untitled,” might be emblematic of those GoGo years; the piece was produced with gold metallic paint and sold at auction at Phillips (London) for about $3 million. Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962) seems, in retrospect, to forecast that Golden Age.**
To be sure there are many golden moments, and Trump’s so-called “golden age” might equally be called the age of the golden goose, or the age of pyrite for its false promises. The Golden Bough, anthropologist James George Frazer’s book about magic progression through religion to art, kings and finally to scientific thought. Possibly not Trump’s case; science has been sidelined; case in point, RFK Jr’s confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary. Here in 2025, it seems that all that glitters is more twitter and twaddle than anything much of value. But…
Gold has always found a home in all manner of art — functional, decorative, low, high, and investment-grade. Cimabue, Giotto, and Gustave Klimt are just a few of the names who incorporated gold leaf or gold paint into their works.
Frenchman Yves Klein, famous for his signature cobalt blue works, turned to churning out gold monochromes; the Italian artist, the irascible Piero Manzoni, also dipped his brush into the golden paint bucket to make his own monochromes, but it was American Jeff Koons who turned to gold to great effect. “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” 1988, pushed his kitsch aesthetic to absurdity, honoring the pop singer and his pet monkey in a porcelain and gilded statue and seemed to capture the Zeitgeist. Another American, Paul McCarthy, did his own golden version of Koons’s version and went full cartoon, a harbinger of the loony tunes the art world would eventually embrace. While not American, art world jester Maurizio Cattelan created and installed an 18-karat gold toilet in the fifth-floor bathroom in New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. That piece, which was casually used by visitors in the restroom, was aptly titled, of course, “America.”***
Coda: So with the new golden age of America upon us, and the price of gold (a safe haven for investors) hitting an all-time price of $2950 an ounce, will any kind of artist, new or old embrace the current landscape to recast the remaining shards into a different golden thing?
NOTES
*Ellen Levy’s book, A Book About Ray, is sensational and big and generous in its understanding and illustration of the mysterious American artist. I highly recommend it. The writing is clear, and concise and a must have for anyone interested in this pure, American collage master, and creator of The New York Correspondence School, the birth of mail art.
After receiving my copy, I scoured the internet for Ray Johnson’s first book, The Paper Snake. After seeing Llámalo de otra manera / Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974) in 2023 at Madrid’s contemporary art museum, Reina Sofia, curated by the New York-based curators, Alice Centamore and Christian Xatrec, I saw the complete activities and publications of Fluxus artist and publisher Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press. Ray Johnson’s first book, The Paper Snake, was a featured work. I’d only glimpsed an original 1965 copy years ago and became obsessed with getting my own copy. Siglio Press re-editioned the book in 2014, but I thought I could find one of the originals.
It took more than a year. Prices for the 1965 book were as high as $1500, most around $300 to $500. I found one online, oddly enough, in a bookstore just a 10-minute walk from my house, A Balzac A Rodin (14 bis rue de La Grande Chaumière Paris, France 75006)–and only 123 euros! My trip there was like stepping into the bookseller’s mind – a collection of disorder: Books piled everywhere, little or no rhyme or reason to the thousands of books in this enormous basement of printed matter, some items dating from the 1920s but most from the 1950s to the present day. Borges on drugs?
The owner, Florian de Vaulchier, seemed to have aged along with the collection all the while sitting at his simple wooden desk. Here he was, a wool hat pulled over his head armed with a wine glass topped off with beer, studying something on his computer. I interrupted him mid-sip, explaining what I was looking for, but he shook his head, didn’t know what I was talking about, indicated some far off shelves – go have a look – then suggested the book might have gone off to auction a year ago, he didn’t know. They were shuttering the shop soon, he said in consolation, and drifted back to his screen, leaving me to wander through what was once upon a time, a monument to contemporary art, but clearly now a shrine to disarray. I spent an hour thrashing about, but found no Ray Johnson Paper Snakes; the owner’s son arrived and offered a warm handshake but no help. He was sorry he’d never heard of the book, and bid me farewell.
More and more online digging brought me to New York’s Granary Books. Yes! A 1965 and, whoa! Only $50 – and their last one; insane, no? I bought it. Had it shipped to artist friend Stephanie Brody-Lederman who was set to return to Paris that next week. It arrived just in time at her apartment in New York and delivered to me at her apartment in Paris two days after Christmas. The book is wonderful, and I’m glad to have it. Thank you, universe.
** Note bene, in 1983 I worked as a copy editor for Warhol’s Interview Magazine at the reconverted Con Edison power station on 34th and Madison, where Ron Reagan, Jr., then a dancer in the Joffrey Ballet, worked as a contributing editor and his wife Doria spent hours transcribing Andy’s cassette tape interviews.
***In 2017, when the Trump administration White House requested the loan of a Vincent van Gogh painting from the Guggenheim collection, “Landscape with Snow,” the museum’s chief curator Nancy Spector suggested instead Cattelan’s work “America,” a sculpture of a gold toilet. (See Wikipedia). In 2023, four men were charged with the theft of the 18-carat gold toilet from Blenheim Palace, the sprawling English mansion.
Matthew Rose is an artist and writer living and working in Paris, France. His most recent book, Natural Causes, has just been published on lulu.com. More info at his Instagram
Read more Matthew Rose articles on Artblog.
