Unfailingly, for the past half century, my good friend David Schoffman would begin each day by reading the failing NewYork Times. It started as a habit and with time it turned into a talismanic ritual. For David, incidents and events, even if witnessed with his own eye, did not verifiably occur until it was reported in the Times. For this superstitious reason and above the reasonable objections of the various interested parties, each of his six marriages were announced in the Sunday Style section.
As a native of Queens, it should come as no surprise that the current American Commander-in-Chief shares a similar obsession with the "paper of record". And the affinities don't end there. New Yorkers, as if by birthright, assume that bloviating self-aggrandizement is a perfectly unassailable exercise.
Schoffman is no exception.
With a face as stern as an undertaker he will assert to anyone who will listen that he, David Schoffman, is the greatest painter of the age.
"I am the Titian of our time," is his standard boast and it would no doubt prove to be a provocative claim if today's art loving public knew who Titian was. If Schoffman had a shred of marketing savvy he would be comparing himself to Banksy instead.
But of course, that too would ring hollow to our current crop of InstaChatters who might be forgiven if, upon reaching their maturity are no longer able to remember the difference between a Banksy and an Ivan Boesky.
As a Parisian I concede, that to me, the American popular imagination is something of a mystery. Nonetheless, let me submit an innocuous piece of speculation, (and here, I too, find common ground with the current occupant of the Oval Office).
The failing New York Times has indeed failed. It has failed to lift young readers by turning them into skeptical, curious cultural curmudgeons. They seem to have left a fallow furrow only to be cultivated by others less intellectually circumspect. And it is right here where the Trump genius is most manifest.
He has recognized that ours is an age of luster and simplicity. Inoculated from nuance, my American friends have resuscitated the grinning deer from their collective headlights and have turned it into a golden calf.
Given the choice, perhaps I too would choose the high-fat hedonism of binge streaming to the weighty and excoriating implications of David Schoffman's gravely serious painterly manifestos.
Fortunately, I still live in the land of Sartre and Camus, Lyotard and Baudrillard, Diderot and Derrida, Barthes and Foucault.
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