Long live 'STUFF'!

Just a little—and we mean infinitesimal—detail from Kim Hastreiter’s home office, inside her maximally kitted-out Fifth Avenue apartment, reproduced from her over-the-top visual memoir, STUFF: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos—in which mementos from dear friends like Phyllis Diller, seen here, rub shoulders with artworks, fashion, objects, trinkets, souvenirs, snapshots, archival materials and anything expressive of an idea by luminaries, players and makers from across the spectrum of all NYC cultural classes of the past fifty years. John Waters, Jim Walrod, Isabel and Ruben Toledo, Paige Powell, Carlo McCormick, Keith Haring, Tauba Auerbach, Stephen Sprouse, Duro Olowu, Jeffrey Deitch … she tries her best to namecheck her friends, collaborators and inspirations, but the book is only 448 pages, after all. “I am a fanatical collector and curator of ‘stuff,’ Hafstreiter writes. “Mostly stuff that I think is amazing, important, tells a good story or just grabs my heart. After decades of obsessive collecting and brutal editing, I eventually came to realize that the objects I chose to keep told the best stories of my pretty crazy life so far—reflecting the way I’ve seen my unique slice of history evolve. There’s a reason I describe this as ‘more than a memoir.’ Looking back, I now see that this big chaotic archive also shows the influence of the radical history, and important people, and subcultural markers I’ve witnessed and participated in over the past 50 years, living as part of a maverick creative community in the greatest city on earth.” She concludes with advice for the new generation: “Please don’t leave it up to a generation 50 years from now, or, God Forbid, AI (!) to reinterpret what you are witnessing. Document it! Write about it! Film it! Make art about it! Collect important stuff that tells stories! Because when you are sitting many decades from now watching the 25-year-olds make art, music, films and books about it, you can bet you’ll be shaking your head wishing you had.”

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