IMPECCABLE ETHICS

As we've all come to lament, with one little tweet an entire career can come to ruin.

My #sad friend David Schoffman has learned this the hard way.

After years of toil and tireless dedication, somehow the president-elect's diabolic scope trained its malevolence upon my unassuming comrade and derailed his stock in the art world. 

It started years before the election when Schoffman was a young apprentice groping toward stardom during the turbulent 1980's. He met il Duce at a Starn Twins opening at Leo Castelli. If you knew David in those days you'd know that in the service of his insatiable ambition he could turn on his charm like a halogen.

They hit it off immediately. 

An untutored collector of gaudy baubles and glittery trinkets the Don made an exception with Schoffman. After visiting his Hoboken studio the vicar of steaks, foreign golf courses and midtown real estate purchased no fewer than eighteen half-baked neo-expressionist canvases.

Schoffman, oil on canvas, 1981

When several years later, David shocked the public with a poorly timed stylistic volte-face, Donald stuck by him with an almost blind sense of loyalty.

Schoffman, encaustic on paper, 1986

Thanks to his powerful patron, Schoffman weathered the critical fallout and watched his star steadily rise.

Then came the election. 

Like most reasonably intelligent people, regardless of their political stripes, David looked skeptically upon the candidacy of such an unfiltered political novice. Remembering his early debt, he remained quiet with his reservations. 

When the polls closed and the die was cast Schoffman suddenly realized that he would soon have a collector in the White House!

Little did David know that the prudent president to be was already two steps ahead of him. 

Fearing that his brand would be tainted by its proximity to contemporary art, Trump took the extraordinary step of placing Schoffman's work in a trust so blind that even the Russians would have a hard time locating it.

When David voiced his modest and well-founded concern for the potential curatorial availability of his work (Schoffman has two mid-career retrospectives scheduled in the very near future), the reaction was swift and unabashed.

Might Alec Baldwin pick up the slack?

IN THEORY ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE IN CALIFORNIA

I have a weakness for ambiguity. Wooly assertions inexactly expressed and pretending toward some vague type of profundity can awaken in me cognitive connections that resemble something akin to poetry.

There are a few good writers working today who are masters of this type of misty lyricism. 

René Lagrimar, the author of, among other things, Swaddled in Tracht immediately comes to mind. Gammy Sinclair, whose Accept The Act singlehandedly influenced an entire generation of young anarchists to organize on Pinterest remains for me a galvanizing force of anti-nature. And Prem Morran, with his breathtaking Surge Beyond Capacity, created a unique minor masterpiece of florid equivocation.

My Los Angeles colleague David Schoffman dabbles in this sort of rough literary obfuscation as well. In addition to painting small, lapidary gimcracks masquerading as serious art he has the dubious distinction of having authored more than seventy-five extremely wordy cultural manifestos. 

He goes through publishers like a footballer goes through cleats and it never ceases to amaze me how he's never at a loss for readers.

He too writes in that diaphanous misdirected manner that I admire so much. The problem with Schoffman is his insistence on pandering to the middlebrow variety of highbrow reader rendering his books just a wee bit too readable.

I frankly think it's a cheap shtick and it goes a long way in explaining his popularity. (It's worth noting that his books are rarely found on the syllabi of professors from prestigious art schools and universities. Instead he finds himself a mainstay at junior and community colleges, especially in the midwest.)

There's a rumor going around that David is working on a children's animated comedy feature about Kafka's love life. 

Now that might actually be a great idea!