Artist and art teacher extraordinaire, Michael Craig-Martin was doubly honoured in Dallas on 10 April. At the Goss-Michael Foundation, Craig-Martin was feted at the MTV Re:define 2015 gala dinner. The Dublin-born, Yale-educated and London-based honouree also launched his memoir, On Being an Artist. The handsomely illustrated volume, which is published by Art/Books, is both an autobiography and a guide to would-be artists. Never let an experience (good, bad or bizarre) go to waste is a key theme. Persistence is another. Craig-Martin displayed both in 1963 when the cash-strapped young artist who had just arrived in London stumbled into big-time journalism. His first and only assignment placed him at the centre of the Profumo affair, the hottest story of the day, which almost brought down the British government. His employer? Newsweek no less. The magazine’s London bureau chief, Sheward Hagerty, a fellow young Yale graduate whom Craig-Martin had cold-called a week before, got in touch with a job offer the artist couldn’t refuse. “Something’s come up,” Hagerty said, warning: “You need to do it seven days a week, 12 hours a day.” But the $11-a-day fee was fabulous. “This was a fortune to me,” Craig-Martin recently told the Dallas magazine FD Luxe. “There was no way I was going to say no.” So that summer he staked out the West End apartment building where the “girl-about-town” at the centre of the sex-and-spying scandal was holed up. Christine Keeler and Craig-Martin never met, but she occasionally leaned out of a window to wave at the solitary artist-turned-hack. (The rest of the press pack had soon moved on when it became clear she’d sold her story to the News of the World.) “I thought she might one day ask me upstairs, but this did not happen, even on lonely Sunday afternoons when everything, even the café, was closed and the streets were depressingly empty,” he writes. The story has a suitably downbeat ending. Newsweek spiked his day-in-the-life profile of Keeler. Investigative journalism’s loss was the art world’s gain. Ten murals by Craig-Martin will brighten up venues across Dallas this spring.
