The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

That night of #53, we’d set up a tripod in front of her piece. The video is simple—all you see are the white-gloved hands, like butler’s hands. Cam, me, and Addison. We remove the painting from the wall and take it offscreen. Addison was supposed to replace herself. Reposition her portrait with her own face on film where the portrait had been hanging. Then five long beats, click the remote to stop the camera, boom. End.

Our plan was to leave the tripod right there, and run this on an unending loop. So instead of looking at Addison’s portrait, you’re watching the movie of the portrait being stolen, and the subject of the portrait take the portrait’s place—as if she is sitting for her portrait.

That night, everything is clockwork. Addison did her beats. But then, after she jumped off, she whipped out a can of spray paint from her hoodie pocket and tagged, Z, FUCK U on the wall. The whole thing was so immature. So beneath Addison Stone’s artistry. Plus it added seven crippling seconds to the video. It was completely wrong for the flow and the meta of the film.

Cam and I came as close as we ever have to writing Addison out of our lives for that. We’d risked big. For sure, part of me is still in grudge mode. I still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Even now. She’d dragged us into this high-art stunt, and then she turned it into a vendetta against an old boyfriend? We both felt betrayed.

LUCY LIM: Addy’s mind was genius. But her heart was sometimes stuck in high school. And how can you blame her for hating Zach? Or for taking out her anger in a major public way, which was where Addy took everything? I wish she’d had more time here. Time on earth, I mean, to make truly spectacular and mature works of art. Addison never grew up. She never got to become the force she ought to have been.

LINCOLN REED: Up till the moment Cam showed me the feedback loop, I’d been hugely respectful of #53. But when I saw Ads writing that message—to Zach Frat, of all people—I felt sick. So wrong. First I felt like Addison had stepped into dog shit as an artist. Second, I felt that she’d screwed our relationship. My usual reaction to a situation I can’t process was just to bolt. So I did.

STARGAZER LUZ: My brother drove straight from New York to see me in Key West. All the way down the East Coast. It took him a day and a night, and he pulled in around 3 A.M. We sat in my kitchen, and he spilled his heart. He talked about how much he loved Addison Stone, and about how he couldn’t deal with her—her careless habits, her demands, the emotional space she sucked out of his private life. He told me how he hated Gil Cheba and Zach Frat and Max Berger. He told me how her mania unnerved him. He told me he was debilitated to think he’d never know a love as big as his and Addison’s. At the same time, even the love felt like too much.

But mostly he talked about what Addison did at the Whitney. He couldn’t believe that after all the prep work, and all the conversations, the soul-searching, and all the deep thinking that Addison put into this project, that she’d gone and made it into a Zach-revenge thing.

At one point, Addison sent him a photo of what she’d done to her self-portrait. She’d blurred the eyes and mouth. “My Face Is Tears,” she wrote him. “Come back to me.”

I advised him not to. Nobody knows what it’s like to live with a ticking time bomb unless you’ve done it before. Mom and I’d lived that way with Robard. And it was awful. Truly damaging.

My Face Is Tears by Addison Stone, courtesy of The Sinclair Corp.

MAXWELL BERGER: “Art Babe Takes Self, Leaves Proof.” It’s a killer headline, the one in The Times. Big, honking scandal. I couldn’t have scripted it better, except for the bullshit at the end. But I got that changed, got Zach Frat excised. The next day I had my people scrub the video, so that it could be what it was meant to be. Addison knew we’d get techies to trim it. So nobody who saw the Biennial ever saw Zach. And as everyone knows, Addison was the hit of the show.

ERICKSON MCAVENA: Now that Addison’s gone, and there’s a basic agreement that the arts lost another genius, there’s also a conversation out there about the lasting significance of her work. I’m real pleased for that. But when she was alive, a lot of people treated her mostly as a curiosity—a high-stepping, three-legged show-pony. You can take Max Berger to task for a lot, but he always knew she was major. The fact that she’s so big now, revered, so soon after her death—I’m not sure if it would have made her laugh or pissed her off.

ZACH FRATEPIETRO: In the end, if you cracked open everything that was Addison, and spread out all of those different parts of her life in front of you, the machine always builds and rebuilds to create an Addison-and-Zach monster. That’s all I’m saying about #53.

BILL FIELDBENDER: While Addison was thinking up Project #53, we knew she’d been working on a few other portraits. She Skyped with Arlene and me when she finished Exit Roy, and Max Berger sold her self-portrait, too—her careful disfiguring of her eyes and mouth had given it an extra measure of notoriety.

She’d also, very quietly, been doing some studies of Sophie Kiminski. She had alluded to the Sophie studies once or twice, but she was always so self-critical about her early sketches that, until a finished piece emerged, it was best to assume that she was slashing Xs and discarding most of this effort.

Arlene and I really liked the finished Exit Roy as an example of a certain style of painting Addison was exploring. There’s such deep psychological insight in this image. Her father looks washed away, uncertain, absent. As if everything he’d ever wanted to become had been siphoned out of him.

Exit Roy by Addison Stone, courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.

LUCY LIM: I saw the sketches of Sophie. She showed them to me secretly. They were really good, but kind of a shocker. Addy absolutely did not want Lincoln to find out. Everyone knew Sophie had a coke problem, and Lincoln hadn’t been able to get Sophie clean, and Addy kept imagining and reimagining Sophie all coked-up and spooky. When Addy sent me some snaps, I just about fell over. I advised her to bury the whole concept.

“The thing is, Max wants me to finish a Sophie portrait,” she told me on one of our calls. “He says there’s already a buyer.”

“No, Addy. Don’t put it out there,” I said. “Lincoln and Sophie had a past. He doesn’t want to be reminded. You’ll hurt him.”

“What about my hurt? Sophie’s always talking to people about how I don’t deserve Lincoln. How I’m overrated.”