BAD BUSINESS MOVE

I rarely collaborate. I am too narcissistic, too jealous, too competitive, and way too petulant to collaborate with other artists. This egregious defect has served me well. The name Currado Malaspina is untainted by associations with lesser minds and inferior talents.

But I recently made an exception.

The project was simply too tempting.

Micah Carpentier's Song of Songs is a vital contribution to the contemporary art discourse. 

Los Angeles painter Dahlia Danton has reproduced this 1972 masterwork from one of Latin America's greatest artists. Micah Carpentier, considered the "Cuban Duchamp," illustrated the biblical poem The Song of Songs and kept the manuscript in a drawer. In 2002, Carpentier's nephew Ezra, discovered the work and donated it to Havana's famed Micah Carpentier Archive. Through the intervention of the State Department and the University of Turin, Danton was granted the sole right to reproduce Carpentier's drawings and enjoyed unlimited access to the archive.

The book, published in August 2022 includes Danton's annotations, a short essay by me and a preface by my good friend David Schoffman.

This will probably be the last time I collaborate with anyone.

The potential residuals are minuscule and the work I put in by way of reputational capital is too costly.

 

The Failure

By every measure, my dear friend David Schoffman is a failure. Though this judgement seems harsh (isn't judgement harsh by nature?), is there really much to gain by equivocation?

Prolific and even talented, Schoffman remains, in his seventh decade, as obscure as a locksmith. I wonder sometimes how he does it.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year he works in his studio producing one work of art after another. The sheer variety is staggering but what is truly impressive is the consistency with which each new project is greeted by the public with indifference.

A lesser failure would have quit long ago.

To list his failures would be cruel but a short inventory of some recent exercises in futility would suffice to make my point. Let's begin with his 100-panel polyptych The Body Is His Book. He worked on this piece for over fifteen years and though he has exhibited fragments of it throughout the years, the pictures are gathering dust in his dusty studio.

Or how about his podcast, Timmy Black Presents: The Lives of Contemporary Artists? After four years and 125 episodes, he's never exceeded more than a few loyal (and indulgent) listeners.

His YouTube channels are equally desolate.  Hundreds of short, clever videos go unwatched and yet inexplicably, Schoffman goes on.

Even after he invented me, Currado Malaspina, his failure persisted like a bad smell. Together we created two handmade illuminated volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy and even that effort turned out to be a professional piss-in-the-wind.

His failure though is fluid. Even as a female abstract painter, Schoffman's charming and decorative abstractions (presented to the world as the work of Dahlia Danton) have fallen flat.

You'd think that he might have attracted a few conservative admirers as a landscape watercolorist, but failure adheres to Schoffman like tar.

I'm sure that Schoffman's failure is so complete, so indelible, so inscrutable, that you haven't even managed to read this to the end.

Behold The Book: The Rise of Attention Surplus

Of all the harebrained, self-aggrandizing schemes perpetrated by my dear comrade, David Schoffman, this one is the most flippant. Like all neurotics, David is a master of unscientific medical diagnoses. Inventing a brand new debility is another classic case of a solution in search of a problem.

This so-called "attention surplus" syndrome pretends to identify an ability some people may have, to evade the distractions of technology. As we all acknowledge by now, such a rare and remote aptitude is simply impossible.

Let's all be adult about this. It's time to definitively wave goodbye to prolonged patience.

MICAH CARPENTIER'S SONG OF SONGS

 

Together with my good friend, David Schoffman, I have found myself involved in all manner of dubious enterprises. I regret most of them. Linking my fate to the notoriously unreliable Los Angeles painter has caused irreparable damage to my credibility.

That said, there are some lingering advantages to our collaborations. For one, I have gained significant access to the highest echelons of Southern California's art politburo. To most North American arts professionals, Paris remains a provincial backwater, best relegated to Instagram-ready vacation photos. Thanks to Schoffman, I'm almost a household name among the L.A. artsy cognoscenti.

Another benefit has been my lasting affiliation with the Plausible Deniability Project™. Our latest project has been the publication of Micah Carpentier's Song of Songs, a beautiful facsimile of an original artist book by the legendary Cuban artist. Edited and annotated by Dahlia Danton, the book includes tributes by both David and I. 

In all modesty, my essay is much more interesting.

STUBS

My dear, dear friend David Schoffman is at a loss. 

Devoid of clever ideas, lacking both purpose and patience, innocent of the tactical conditions for conventional for success, he has taken to wandering the streets of Los Angeles with a folding stool, a miniature sketchbook and a pocketful of pencils and erasures.

He's been preparing for this moment his entire career. While he knows that his best work is behind him, he also knows that his legacy is secure. His magnum opus The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings is recognized, in the words the New York critic Spark Boon as "... one of the monuments of post-modernist Romantic revisionism." 

Scholars (and even Schoffman himself) have debated for years whether Boon's characterization is a favorable rendering of this complex polyptych but all seem to agree that this legendary work of art includes a lot of different colors. 

The Body Is His Book #79

 

A MAN GROWS OLDER

Having taken stock of over four decades of professional artistic activity, my good friend David Schoffman is feeling the melancholy tremors of mortality.

No longer considered, in the words of critic Spark Boon, the "best of the bohemian bêtes-noires," he has settled, of late, in his vacation home on Fire Island, reading true-crime novels and making small, naked self-portraits.

It's a sad decline but wholly appropriate. David never really had what it took to truly stir the public's imagination. His work was too serious, too hermetic, too intellectual, too metaphysical, too simple, too complex, and too early.    

 

THE PAINTINGS OF DAVID SCHOFFMAN AS IMAGINED AT A DYSTOPIAN KARAOKE BAR

My dear, dear North American friend David Schoffman fashions himself as an intellectual. At every opportunity he flaunts his (extremely) limited erudition. His tastes, though catholic, are predictable. At best I'd consider him a charmingly pretentious dilettante.

He can, however, carry a tune (barely).

I do love this video.

 

LOST IN TRANSLATION

My good friend David Schoffman is your typical opinionated, over-educated, urban American artist. That is to say that unlike my colleagues here in Paris, Schoffman is loud.

You see, nobody is more obnoxious, yet more stimulating than a French intellectual. By contrast, in the United States, 'serious' culture is always inflected with wry references to populist entertainment. One could easily survive a dinner party in Paris without being familiar with Lupin but it is practically inconceivable spending an evening with a bunch of New York highbrows without anyone making a reference to Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Schoffman may very well be the only exception to this rule yet with certain qualifications. Though I doubt  David could tell the difference between Beyoncé and Adele he is a fanatical enthusiast of the viral podcast Timmy Black Presents: The Lives of Contemporary Artists.

I find this baffling.

PDP™ · The Lives of Contemporary Artists: Episode 115