AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Like many obscenely successful contemporary artists, my good friend David Schoffman hasn't touched a paintbrush in years. Instead, he sends a few digital images, some vague directions and a handful of clumsy sketches to his two top lieutenants in Shenzhen, boards his internal propulsion bowrider and waits.

Having his work fabricated in China has many obvious advantages. For one, the art schools over there churn out incredibly well-trained draftsmen with little or no prospect of monetizing their talents. All David has to do is send a short text with the words "pink," "red" and "pattern" and within a few days he receives a jpg of this:

With labor, shipping and tariffs the mark-up on a painting like this is typically around 2900%.

To consider Schoffman a sellout is like longing for the days of internet dial-up. Only graduate students do their own work now and within just a few years of earning their degree they're either teaching, painting someone else's paintings or if they are among the fortunate few, sending their own vague directives to artisans in the developing world.

Fortunately, all this is about to change. President-elect Trump has announced that his daughter Ivanka will no longer have her clothing lines manufactured overseas! As a Wiccan, a religious denomination that punishes duplicity by instant damnation, he is committed to avoiding even the slightest expression of hypocrisy.

Schoffman now faces a stark and cruel choice. 

Does he continue with business as usual, pay the usurious import taxes and reduce his profits? (Art market analysts estimate the mark-up to diminish to 1900%). Or does he shift his operation to the United States.

Time will tell but one thing already seem apparent. Donald Trump will soon make American Art Great Again!

BEWITCHED AND BEWILDERED

I recently read an interesting piece of investigative journalism that advanced the well-substantiated notion that the Trump family are Wiccans. This wasn't published on some clickbait gossip mill but in the extremely reputable Journal des planches, the news and culture quarterly that comes out of Paris' prestigious PolyScience.

I mention this not because I feel that Wiccans are less equipped to govern our cousins across the sea but because my good friend David Schoffman, an artist of no small influence, has done a considerable amount of design work for the Wiccan church.

He told me that the Wicaan elders are a very reasonable lot and the fact that the Trumps value the counsel of witches should in no way alarm the general public.

Of greater concern, he went on to explain, is the fact that the Trump family is heavily leveraged with the Crown Prince of North Staakijian, a small, mineral rich monarchy that claimed its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Staakijian Fresco

By a not so strange coincidence, my good friend David has just completed a monumental fresco for the Staakijian House of Parliament, an architectural fig leaf where semi-annual meetings take place for the benefit of YouTube.

The fact that my colleague finds little or no conflict in working for religious cranks and despots is upsetting but not surprising. He's always been a social climber. What troubles me are the small degrees of separation between he and the Trumps.

I've always suspected Schoffman of subtle forms of aesthetic compromise. But here we find evidence of something much more flagrant.

There's a rumor circulating that David is hard at work designing the new Trump coat of arms, a royal tradition that the President-elect hopes to revive in order to make America a bit more European again.

At least he's not working for Gadaffi anymore.

INFLECTION, INFECTION ... IS THERE EVEN A DIFFERENCE?

My good friend David Schoffman has done it again! He has read the pulse of his adolescent country and has turned his despondency into cash. Having long abandoned his frivolous hopes of correcting the world through ideas, in pure, gung-ho American fashion he has turned foolishness into an active and potentially lucrative enterprise.

Schoffman has taken to the airwaves!

His podcasts and audio books have brought his gravelly baritone into the cars and earbuds of thousands of listeners. Capitalizing on his countrymen's insatiable appetite for carefully curated self-esteem, David has culled the collective idiot wisdom typically found in your average, large-type, pop psychology, trade paperback mash-up and has packaged these platitudes into neat half hour digital hors d'oeuvres.

But allow me to digress.

As a child in the turbulent 60's the 19ème was a place far removed from the rage of Nanterre and the chaos that followed. Instead of burning cars and hurling cobblestones at policemen, I spent most of my time smoking Moroccan hashish in the Buttes Chaumont and writing bad poetry about unrequited, bisexual love.

 And yet one could never fully escape the feeling that something radical was changing in French culture. Les idées reçues were not only questioned but rejected outright. "Received wisdom" was by definition suspect and as a result le bébé a été noyé dans le bain. Much that was valuable was jettisoned into the general rubble and only in retrospect did we realize that the baby had indeed been tossed out with the bathwater.

Simone de Beauvoir

Who would have imagined that almost 50 years later the banality of 'received wisdom' would experience such an unexpected renaissance.

And who would imagine that the anarchist gadfly David Schoffman would be turning this turn of events into coin.

Reading, as we all know, is an active engagement between the writer and the reader. This dynamic has produced a fabulous tradition of what Dr. Richard St-Gosse called "skeptical empathy." Gosse writes that when a person approached a page the text becomes propriété communale or communal property. Implicit in the relationship is that the book can never be a commodity but rather a conversation.

In contrast to propoganda, there is little desire to persuade and more of a need to pick a fight. We love our books even as we debate with them. The reason early education specialists emphasize literacy is that they consider small children capable of critical thinking.

Which, of course, gives children a massive intellectual leg up on their Facebook/FakeNews elders.

In any event, having failed to fix this mess during the first half of his ineffectual life, my dear friend David is intent on exploiting technology in order to infect the world instead.

Or to put it in Schoffman's own blunt language, "it's not my fault everyone has become so fucking stupid!"