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!

BEWITCHED AND BEWILDERED

I recently read an interesting piece of investigative journalism that advanced the well-substantiated notion that the Trump family are Wiccans. This wasn't published on some clickbait gossip mill but in the extremely reputable Journal des planches, the news and culture quarterly that comes out of Paris' prestigious PolyScience.

I mention this not because I feel that Wiccans are less equipped to govern our cousins across the sea but because my good friend David Schoffman, an artist of no small influence, has done a considerable amount of design work for the Wiccan church.

He told me that the Wicaan elders are a very reasonable lot and the fact that the Trumps value the counsel of witches should in no way alarm the general public.

Of greater concern, he went on to explain, is the fact that the Trump family is heavily leveraged with the Crown Prince of North Staakijian, a small, mineral rich monarchy that claimed its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Staakijian Fresco

By a not so strange coincidence, my good friend David has just completed a monumental fresco for the Staakijian House of Parliament, an architectural fig leaf where semi-annual meetings take place for the benefit of YouTube.

The fact that my colleague finds little or no conflict in working for religious cranks and despots is upsetting but not surprising. He's always been a social climber. What troubles me are the small degrees of separation between he and the Trumps.

I've always suspected Schoffman of subtle forms of aesthetic compromise. But here we find evidence of something much more flagrant.

There's a rumor circulating that David is hard at work designing the new Trump coat of arms, a royal tradition that the President-elect hopes to revive in order to make America a bit more European again.

At least he's not working for Gadaffi anymore.

INFLECTION, INFECTION ... IS THERE EVEN A DIFFERENCE?

My good friend David Schoffman has done it again! He has read the pulse of his adolescent country and has turned his despondency into cash. Having long abandoned his frivolous hopes of correcting the world through ideas, in pure, gung-ho American fashion he has turned foolishness into an active and potentially lucrative enterprise.

Schoffman has taken to the airwaves!

His podcasts and audio books have brought his gravelly baritone into the cars and earbuds of thousands of listeners. Capitalizing on his countrymen's insatiable appetite for carefully curated self-esteem, David has culled the collective idiot wisdom typically found in your average, large-type, pop psychology, trade paperback mash-up and has packaged these platitudes into neat half hour digital hors d'oeuvres.

But allow me to digress.

As a child in the turbulent 60's the 19ème was a place far removed from the rage of Nanterre and the chaos that followed. Instead of burning cars and hurling cobblestones at policemen, I spent most of my time smoking Moroccan hashish in the Buttes Chaumont and writing bad poetry about unrequited, bisexual love.

 And yet one could never fully escape the feeling that something radical was changing in French culture. Les idées reçues were not only questioned but rejected outright. "Received wisdom" was by definition suspect and as a result le bébé a été noyé dans le bain. Much that was valuable was jettisoned into the general rubble and only in retrospect did we realize that the baby had indeed been tossed out with the bathwater.

Simone de Beauvoir

Who would have imagined that almost 50 years later the banality of 'received wisdom' would experience such an unexpected renaissance.

And who would imagine that the anarchist gadfly David Schoffman would be turning this turn of events into coin.

Reading, as we all know, is an active engagement between the writer and the reader. This dynamic has produced a fabulous tradition of what Dr. Richard St-Gosse called "skeptical empathy." Gosse writes that when a person approached a page the text becomes propriété communale or communal property. Implicit in the relationship is that the book can never be a commodity but rather a conversation.

In contrast to propoganda, there is little desire to persuade and more of a need to pick a fight. We love our books even as we debate with them. The reason early education specialists emphasize literacy is that they consider small children capable of critical thinking.

Which, of course, gives children a massive intellectual leg up on their Facebook/FakeNews elders.

In any event, having failed to fix this mess during the first half of his ineffectual life, my dear friend David is intent on exploiting technology in order to infect the world instead.

Or to put it in Schoffman's own blunt language, "it's not my fault everyone has become so fucking stupid!"

REQUIEM FOR AN UNREMARKABLE CAREER

Like most liberal sophisticates, my good friend David Schoffman was a skeptic. As a native New Yorker of a certain age, David's dyspathetic attitude toward the meditative, medicated cult of the feel-good had been an article of reliable faith.

At least that was the case until he moved to Los Angeles and started hanging out with the lovely but kooky Dahlia Danton.

Almost overnight, Schoffman went from a hard scrapple, sarcastic, chain smoking curmudgeon to a shaved-headed, juice-fasting lover of cats. And what some might consider even worse, he moderated his opinions into equivocal, milquetoasted, pre-diegested evasions that granted gentle amnesty over anything likely to be deemed judgmental.

In a word, David went native.

He even developed a reputation for possessing what they call in Santa Monica, "second sight." By this I think they meant that he acquired such a piercing intuition that speech was no longer necessary. In order to maintain this luster of incorporeal premonition David proclaimed himself a living oracle and began to offer workshops on what he called "the accessible cultivation of the real powers of prophecy."

And truth be told, he both anticipated the Cubs winning the World Series and the election of Donald Trump. He uses a strange graphic system of mapping where probabilities are delineated with obscure pie charts on smudge-proof white boards.

He puts his findings and speculations into a cognitive cocktail shaker and has an uncanny ability to be consistently right!

Needless to say, all this has proven to be remarkably lucrative and as a consequence David has given up painting for good.

Which brings me to a prediction of my own:

No one is going to notice.