DO UNTO OTHERS

My dear friend, David Schoffman, lives in a city that discourages walking. If you're traveling by foot in Los Angeles, unless you're with a dog, you look suspicious . The idea of a pedestrian's "right-of-way" is a form of automotive noblesse oblige and should never be taken for granted.

Walking at night presents a series of hazards of even greater complexity and the innocent flâneur is often mistaken for a tramp. 

As a European I find this all very strange. 

Many people believe that the cultivation of true friendship is nearly impossible in L.A. because most personal relationships are predicated upon  mutual self-interest. Some attribute this to the culture of Hollywood but I think it's because of all the driving.

Think about it.

Cars are like sovereign nations vying for position, power and prestige.

For the most part they all get along, not out of affection but out of convenience. The rogue road warrior typically receives his comeuppance through the intervention of a militarized arbitrator with a note pad. This way the peace is maintained and the free flow of individuals and goods remains stable and relatively secure.

In Los Angeles, people behave like their cars and see human interaction as an iteration of traffic. I won't get in your way so long as you agree not to get in my way and if we both exceed the speed limit at approximately the same rate, together we can advance our cause toward mutual satisfaction. 

My eccentric colleague David, however, insists on

strolling and likewise expects more from his acquaintances than mercenary social arbitrage. He doesn't care if people like him, he just doesn't like being seen as a professional asset.

You see, deserving or not, Schoffman is a distinguished artistic eminence. He's something of a southern Californian doyen whose range of endeavors puts him into contact with the powerful and the pretty. As a result, everyone wants to be his buddy.

He wants nothing of that.

Though occasionally he'll make an exception.

Dahlia Danton with David Schoffman. Date unknown

BREAD AND WATERCOLOR

When my dear friend David Schoffman appeared recently before a closed door hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Arts and Humanities the wags were quick to point out that he brought along two attorneys - one civil and one criminal.

The presumption of guilt is an unavoidable consequence of lawyering-up. There were no subpoenas, no formal charges and even in the absence of incriminating innuendo, the speculation surrounding David's testimony had a quicksilver scent of charred flesh.

You really find out who your enemies are when your back is against the wall and your painting arm is tied behind your back.

Luckily for David, any hot water he might be in has been easily eclipsed by the Russia Scandal. Besides, who really cares about the matters before an Arts and Humanities investagatory panel.

David would have loved to have held a press conference to clear the air but the press was otherwise disposed. And from a career perspective, bad publicity is by definition good publicity so he was hoping for at least a short hatchet job on NPR.

He had his young colleague Spark Boon tweet about it but Boon has a paltry 900 followers.

 So the affair has basically remained local and the alliances have broken down along partisan lines.

Those disposed toward liking Schoffman and who admire his work are supportive and envious. Those who dismiss David as a derivative lightweight are sharpening their daggers, praying for the worst. There's even a Boycott and Divestment movement that is actively working with curators and collectors, urging them to sabotage his resale value. At a recent board meeting at the Museum of Modern Art a resolution was proposed that would essentially prevent any further acquisitions of David's work.

How this will all turn out is anybody's guess. Till they find a smoking gun, everything is still in the realm of factional speculation.

I know he's growing tired of the whole thing, frustrated that social media has basically treated this rare opportunity like a dangling participle. I heard he may be hiring an intern soon to act as his spokesperson.

A SHORT HISTORY OF IDEAS

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.

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)