IN DREAMS BEGIN DISAFFECTION

At the insistence of my complicated friend David Schoffman I recently flew to Iowa City to attend the 14th annual Conference on Unrequited Rationales. CUR, as it is known to all it's participants, is an event where failure is celebrated and where unsung visionaries and under-paid geniuses gather to commiserate over their unjust neglect.

My readers won't be shocked to learn that David who after years of conducting an arid, one-sided discourse with the world of art and ideas, is a regular. He chairs an annual symposium called Why Bother: Futile Strategies for Bitter Perseverance where he presides over a collective condolence call to ambition with his famously percipient wit. 

The fact that within the CUR community David can bask in a dwarfed and infantile aura of fame is an irony that escapes no one. The entire exercise reeks of revenge fantasy, self-help mutual back-scratching and retirement home kvetching oneupmanship. 

But at least during the course of four days and three nights, two all you can eat buffets, one tiki-themed barbecue and a cash bar cocktail mixer, David can impersonate a successful person.

As we patient Europeans know, the American experiment in visual art was always a doomed enterprise. With its obsession with speed, efficiency and empty spectacle, the American ethos is incompatible with nuance. Imagine Baudelaire, strolling amid the booths at Miami/Basel chatting with a bemused Théophile Gautier about the cost of fabricating 500 pink porcelain raindrops and the tax advantages of painting over performance art.

My poor, pitiable friend David ... he persists in his belief that his redemption is inevitable. That, barbarians aside, his lovely, antiquated work will ultimately be appreciated by the power brokers and opinion makers.

His unrequited hopes will need much more than clever rationales but at his age it seems unlikely he can adjust. 

If Kafka were alive today, do you think he would open a Twitter account!!??

But then again ...

I CLAUDIUS MEETS THE iPHONE

My good friend David Schoffman is never at a loss for words. In fact some people would call him long-winded. Neither innocence nor ignorance has ever discouraged him from weighing in with his own special brand of discursive moonshine. He's been known to tackle Kurdish autonomy, rugby handicapping, interest rates on the ten-year treasury note, fly-fishing, charter schools, the dangers of wheat, show dogs, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Singapore's health care system and the optimum sauté temperature for olive oil, all in the space of a three-hour dinner party.

On the surface, the scope of his interests may seem wide and even intriguing but knowing him the way I do I can assure you he's very much of a bore.

I say this without the slightest malice or even envy. I'm merely stating a fact. His own wife - who, incidentally, still very much adores the guy - avoids him like a postponed colonoscopy. In their twenty years together she has heard it all at least twice and it never gets better the second time around. She once confided that if she were ever able to keep her eyes open, the crushing redundancies would drive her to drugs.

The only time he's quiet is when he's painting, though I can't even assure you of that.

I once caught him in the studio mumbling to himself while listening to an audiobook of Provençal poetry. I think I heard him kvetching about the poverty of contemporary expressions of courtly yearning though he also could have been talking about his digestion. Anyway, I wasn't sticking around to find out.

Texting seems to slow him down, which is fortunate. It's hard to be garrulous when you're all thumbs.

There might have been a time in the not so distant past where people enjoyed each other's company, shared stories and engaged in passionate debate. Maybe in the old days an aptitude for clever gossip and witty repartee was cultivated and even admired. It could very well be that in the medieval, black and white, pre-Twitter days of yore, glib, sententious memos were seen as rude or at best, incomplete.

      
But then again, I don't remember that far back.

MON AMI

In a few short weeks my dear chum, David Schoffman, will be returning to Paris for his annual pedagogical haj. He teaches a drawing class at one of our esteemed art schools where he pretends to understand our unique Gallic sensibility. I look forward each year to seeing him here, on my terroir, because when he is here in France he is always at a distinct disadvantage.

Away from the balmy ocean breezes, the viridescent palms, the gluten-free cronuts and the drive-thru tanning salons of southern California, David is like a waif at a cockfight. His shaky grasp of idiomatic French, his tepid tolerance for alcohol, his anachronistic codes of chivalric sexuality and his annoying habit of posting his every bowel on Instagram all add up to, if not ugly, at least boorish American provincialism.

I enjoy taunting him, teasing him and provoking him into frenzied tirades of jingoistic defensiveness. Mention Trump and he spins out of control. Talk about overcooked vegetables, diet sodas, baseball or anti-bacterial sprays and he tears into Marine Le Pen as if she were the grand vizier of the Amalekites.

It's fun to have him around. He reminds me of how easy it is to become smug and complacent. Schoffman, the darling of critics and collectors alike, is still a stooge among his peers. His paintings, inoffensive bagatelles of technical decadence, are always loved but never admired.

It will be great having him around. There's really nothing like the warmth of a deep and enduring friendship.

SOY SAD

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.

Spark Boon 2013

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. 

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.

Etiolation, Dahlia Danton, Installation view (Freiburg New Genres Art Fair, booth 215a)

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!

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!