The Neckface Has No Clothes

I first saw it in Chelsea. I was sitting with a friend at the since-closed Espresso Bar, drinking something iced and girly, gesticulating wildly about French Expressionism.

There it was, across the street: yard-tall magic-marker letters across a sad, '80s-style storefront. Neckface.

It didn't make much of an impression at the time, but I recalled it later, as I spotted Neckface on lampposts, sidewalks and dumpsters across the East Village. When the space pirates took Williamsburg, Neckface followed. His marker curled into Gowanus and Bushwick, like the thread of some mullet-haired Ariadne.

I had no idea who Neckface was. A glue-sniffing maniac, perhaps, or a scrawling sign-poster of gentrification. That Neckface was an artist never so much as crossed my mind.

The art world, though, has since hugged Neckface to its prospectus-lined breast. Here he is in Juxtapoz, wearing a black ski mask à la Subcommandante Marcos. (Ski mask? Is The Man trying to take him down?) Here he is voted Best Anonymous Sex Symbol in the Village Voice. Here Paper calls him "the most prolific and idiosyncratic street artist working today." There's his profile in The New Yorker.

Beneath the mask, Neckface turns out to be an ex?Pratt student, championed by a media still in love with Basquiat. Beck buys Neckface's doodles, which sell at L.A.'s New Image Gallery for a cool $5,000.

But he still won't take off that goddamn ski mask. And he still won't say his name. What raises my hackles isn't that he's younger than I, or that he just might be the city's worst graffiti artist.

It's galleries championing outsider art that puts me on edge. I have nothing against the drawings of drug fiends, schizophrenics or graffiti artists, per se. They're often wildly imaginative fun. Still, it's a wee bit contrived finding such work in the white-walled pavilions of Manhattan swank.

I remember a gallery owner I know, a mountain of a man, topped with a bowler hat and surrounded by the foothills of his entourage. "I just found the most lovely heroin addict from Peru," he told me. "Draws in dog feces. And he has cancer. Isn't that marvelous, darling?"

Pampered art professionals enjoy putting something gritty and outlawed on their wall. But they don't want to deal with gritty outlaws, just the word "grit" in their press releases.

And that's Neckface-outside enough to be edgy, but inside enough not to mug the shop. At $30,000 a year, Pratt students are as snug in the establishment as in a ski mask.

The craze for outsider art shows the virgin-whore complex that haunts the art world. The gallery system is all about inflated value. (Why does dog shit on a canvas cost money? Someone important said so.) Yet galleries still buy-or at least sell-the myth of the mute, brilliant artist, slaving in his studio, uncorrupted by capitalism.

And who could be more virginal than an outlaw graffiti artist, untouched by the grubby spunk of art-world commerce? Or maybe gallery owners like outsiders because they don't read contracts.

But I bet Neckface does. They teach you that at Pratt.