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 ...