Lucien Smith, a New York City artist whose art career had stagnated after a sudden rise to fame in the early 2010s, died at the age of 37. The death has come as a surprise to many, given he had recently finished a new collection of paintings and was focusing on a restaurant he opened in 2025.
What Is Zombie Formalism And Why Was His Career Controversial?
Lucien Smith’s career took off in the early 2010s when he was still a student at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NYC. But Lucien was both aware and critical of the pitfalls of the practice. “I knew it was unsustainable.
Luckily I put my earnings in the right places so I would be comfortable,” he had said in an interview with Kenny Schachter on Artnet News pubslihed on July 7, 2021.
However, he soon became dubbed as one of the prime faces of a phenomenon called “zombie formalism,” coined by the late artist and critic Walter Robinson. Such was the demand for his works for the sole purpose of later flipping them that he said he would “sell out of work before getting a chance to even sign them” in the early 2010s. He had admitted in an interview that he knew it was unsustainable beyond a few years and put his money in the “right places” – part of which was the restaurant FOOD.
