Crazy Eddie

Works in Jan’s Market Makers series reflect on the role that branding, marketing, and social media have played in our lives.

Crazy Eddie is an appropriation of a famously-criminal New York City-area wholesaler of audio and video equipment from the 1980’s, the last great era of contemporary art in New York.

‘Crazy Eddie’ Antar ran iconic and hilarious commercials on local television in New York, proclaiming his ability to offer the best prices in town on audio and video equipment, and ending each of his fast-talking advertisements with a wide-eyed pronouncement: ‘our prices are insaaaaaane!’

As he and his brother’s pyramid scheme unraveled, however, Antar fled to Israel, then was extradited, convicted of fraud, and hired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a fraud investigator.

The parallels to the current incumbent in the United States’ top job may be obvious – the use of disruptive bombast in broadcast media to promote obfuscating falsehoods that distract from and effectively cover-up corruption and criminal wrong-doing. Alas: what’s old is new again.