Art Stars Are Back, on a Bigger Canvas : Commentary: As prominent painters of ‘80s turn to film, the art world suffers. The misleading message remains: go for the gold.

Lately, a strange phenomenon has occurred in the worlds of art and entertainment: So-called “art stars” of the 1980s have emerged from hibernation and are now showing up in all the old familiar places--in the glossy magazines and on the streets of New York--and some unfamiliar ones too, like on your local movie screen.

Robert Longo and David Salle, who along with the likes of Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel composed a brash rat pack of young, male American painters in the heady days of the mid-1980s, are now bona fide, if unlikely, filmmakers. (Schnabel’s first film, a documentary, is due out next year.)

Longo directed the screen version of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic “Johnny Mnemonic,” and Salle’s “Search and Destroy” is an adaptation of Howard Korder’s stage play of the same name. On the surface, the two movies could not be less similar: Longo’s is a $27-million Keanu Reeves vehicle aimed at the youth market, while Salle’s considerably smaller film ($1-million budget) stars art-house regulars like Christopher Walken and Griffin Dunne. But the pictures’ timing could not be more telling.

Longo’s and Salle’s return to public life comes after an exile precipitated by a grotesquely inflated market, which didn’t collapse so much as correct itself around 1989. The two artists exemplified the neo-Expressionist style of art-making, typified by huge, usually figurative paintings and sculpture; their works were among the most widely praised and wildly speculated on in the ‘80s--and the most critically vilified after the fall. Come the sober 1990s, they and other ex-stars retreated to Europe and the Hamptons to lick their wounds and tend their estates, which once graced the pages of Vanity Fair.

But now it’s 1995, and while “Greed Is Good” is no longer the prevailing slogan, in this era of newfound conservatism and nostalgia for the ignorant bliss of the Reagan years, some are saying that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Reacting to the previous decade’s excesses, art these days is marked by modesty and self-effacement; though if you listen closely to curators, dealers and critics you’ll hear a small but insistent voice calling for a strong personality to come and sweep us off our feet. So what better time for the return of the art stars, repackaged and ready for the millennium?

The only problem is those stars don’t make art anymore. Though Longo and Salle would argue that the leap from painting to cinema is an easy one to make (tell that to a film-school graduate), the symbolic value--and the practical upshot--of their new careers spell the end of an era in art. Not only are the ‘80s definitively over, but so are the fictions that the decade impressed upon a subsequent generation of young artists.

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The flush years of the mid-’80s offered two false scenarios to those who flocked to the nation’s art schools and master of fine arts programs: First, that art was powerful--that as a message-carrying medium it ranked with film, music and television, and second, that art could make you money. Neither, of course, could be further from the truth.

The art stars may have shared restaurant tables and gossip columns with rock ‘n’ rollers and movie stars, but they never shared their influence--even if their work was the more profound. Art has been, and always will be, about spending slow time in the presence of an original artwork; an oil painting, no matter how big, is no match for the infinitely reproducible, whiz-bang epiphany of a catchy pop tune. On the financial side, at the same time artworks were commanding obscene auction prices, so were things like baseball cards and porcelain dolls. In reality, most artists’ lives are marked by privation, if not penury.

It’s perhaps no coincidence then that both Longo’s and Salle’s films tell of unrepentant yuppies who lie, cheat and even kill to sustain their lifestyles. Salle’s washed-up businessman gets ahead in the ‘90s through a therapeutic program of Nietzschean ruthlessness, while Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic is our conflicted decade personified: He’s rented his brain out to a large corporation for a wad of cash, and now he wants it back. In a scene straight out of one of Longo’s 1983 “Men in the Cities” paintings, young Johnny shakes his fist defiantly at the sky, demanding his memories--and his money. And in the end, he saves the world. Both movies demonstrate that if you stick with it long enough, greed is not just good, but redemptive.

Like their films’ protagonists, Longo and Salle never receive their comeuppance: By waiting out the art-world crash and segueing straight from their respective Elbas into the big business of filmmaking, they perpetuate their fantasies of a world that cannot live without their talents. Once again, they get to smoke big cigars and boss around assistants. Once again, they’re artists--but in Hollywood’s sense of the word, not SoHo’s.

Even if their films flop (“Johnny” had grossed about $15.3 million after 17 days, “Search and Destroy” about $315,000 after 6 1/2 weeks), they’re sure to get more work in a business that often rewards experience over merit. That Salle and Longo can now reach an even larger audience, and get paid for it--while public funding and gallery space for artists continue to dwindle nationwide--must be infuriating to those who toe the line, believing the art world to be part of a just, moral universe. In such a universe, the two would return, hats in hand (as other former art stars have), accepting lowered prices and a diminished profile for the rewards of critical good will and sustainable art careers.

But art is not, and has never been, separate from the vicissitudes of everyday life. When Salle and Longo elude poetic justice, the lesson to young artists is not pretty: Follow the money. But perhaps the truest and best recipe for happiness is this: Get it while you can--or, better yet, don’t care about getting it at all.