In short order the tidy, predictable world of my good friend David Schoffman has been turned upside down.
Unaccustomed to good fortune, just as his career began its meteoric ascent David plunged into a paralyzing despondency and a forlorn state of ignoble self-doubt.
It all began on his 2015 trip San Gimignano to take part in an academic symposium entitled "Downsizing Draftsmanship." In addition to presenting prestigious universities with the means of burnishing their cutting-edge brands, the gathering was tasked in "deconstructing the dubious hypothesis that good painting required only a bare minimum of technical drawing skills.
In a panel called "Plagiarizing: The Poor Man's Appropriation," New York critic Spark Boon decried the "haughty elitism of connoisseurship" that imposed "a facticity of imagined consensus" upon an unsuspecting public. Using his own amateurish doodles as examples Boon posited the improbable assertion that "what was once considered maladroit can now be lauded as ironic."
Schoffman immediately felt the sting of passive peer censure. Though never mentioned by name he felt certain that all eyes were upon him. Nervously he dipped his chopstick into a saucer of ponzu sauce and started scratching a stained nude rendering into his dinner napkin.
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| Spark Boon 2013 |
Schoffman immediately felt the sting of passive peer censure. Though never mentioned by name he felt certain that all eyes were upon him. Nervously he dipped his chopstick into a saucer of ponzu sauce and started scratching a stained nude rendering into his dinner napkin.
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| Schoffman, sauce on cloth, 2015 "My time has arrived too late," he lamented to me later during a weepy 2-hour Skype session. "All my training and all my hard work has left me as the new straw man of Post-Modernism!"  "Yes," I countered, "but you are also now the new, highly commodified éminence grise of the gallery world!" "But I am mocked by my colleagues and pitied by my students," he screamed with bitter indignation, "where is the respect I lacked and craved for so long?" In the end he persuaded me. He - and by extension I - are relics. In the end drawing fluid figures with food is a penny arcade stunt in a world drowning with visual data. Drawing like a Carracci may be a tonic as we age but it will never get you past the bouncer at the Freiburg New Genres Art Fair.  |
