Art World
Get Well Soon, Anthony Haden-Guest
The intrepid reporter had a freak fall this week landing him in the hospital.
Rozalia Jovanovic
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On the morning of October 12, artnet News contributor Anthony Haden-Guest had an ugly accident. He was walking with the speed with which those who know him are familiar when it occurred.
“I had a loaded shoulder bag,” Haden-Guest said in a phone call with artnet News from Bellevue Hospital. He sounded chipper. “It snagged on some scaffolding. I was whiplashed in a circle and hit a metal something or other with my back.” A passerby called an ambulance. Haden-Guest was diagnosed with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung. He had an operation on October 13.
“It’s gone well,” said Haden-Guest, who added that he’d be out of the hospital by Saturday. Ever the optimist, Haden-Guest continued, “I don’t want to sound like a goofy cultist, but there has been an upside. Seriously. It took me off the treadmill. It’s given me time to figure out some things. I think it’s been a changer for me. There, I am sounding like a cultist.”
Haden-Guest, who recently recounted a bizarre set of circumstances in which he was accused of having been responsible for the death of Jean-Michel Basquiat, has been busy at work on several writing projects including a monograph essay on Purvis Young, the late self-taught African-American artist from Miami and a follow-up to his classic book True Colors: The Real Life of The Art World, this one covering the metamorphosis of that world over the last few decades.
Why Bellevue?
“I brought a girlfriend here a few years ago,” he said. “I liked it. It’s not the same place it was when they shot One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest here, but it has a lot of presence. It’s very New York, it’s great.”
