PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN

For an old guy, my good friend David Schoffman is still in pretty good shape. In the summer months he never fully gets dressed and he typically returns from his stuffy studio with his tanned skin stained with paint. 

 

I'm not entirely sure what he's been working on these days. He rarely shows his work and when he does it's usually pictures that are decades old. I know he's busy but he remains annoyingly elusive when quizzed on the substance of his newer projects.

Occasionally he publishes a self-portrait - more as a practical joke than as a serious aesthetic gesture.

Still, I must hand it to him.

He's really in good shape.

SOMEONE SHOULD TELL HIM TO SHUT UP

Judging from the sheer variety of soapboxes he habitually ascends, my dear friend David Schoffman must be the cleanest artist in Los Angeles.

He seems to be everywhere articulating Delphic, epigrammatic and highly quotable pronouncements meant to assure his place in the pantheon of certified cranks.

Unlike his Dada progenitors however, Schoffman has the internet, which, depending on your point of view may be a tragedy or a coincidence.

THOU SHALT NOT

My good yet flawed friend David Schoffman has an image problem.

On the one hand he wants to present himself as a serious artist - one who is indispensable to "the discourse," but on the other hand he seems determined to sabotage his credibility by attaching his name to any number of dubious projects.

While most artists avoid smiling when photographed, David's slanted adolescent grin often comes off as a cynical grimace. His playful nature typically teases our contemporary taboos, insisting that somehow his Brooklyn provenance provides cover for his blunt insensitivity. 

I once heard him blurt out during an unscripted Q and A at one of California's most prestigious art schools that he had no problem with 'cultural appropriation!'

Everyone knows that C.A. is the third rail of artistic halal, but David went feet first into AfroPop's indebtedness to James Brown without the slightest tinge of self-consciousness.  (There was an audible gasp later on when he mentioned having a green bagel with a shmear of jalepeño cream cheese on St. Patrick's Day while sipping on a piping hot cup of Masala Chai).

David's many allies in the art world are growing weary of defending him. He refuses to go on an international apology tour claiming the outdated prerogatives of 'artistic freedom.'

Schoffman is definitely rolling the reputational dice.

I fear, however, that his luck may soon run out.

THE ENIGMA OF ARTISTIC ABSTINENCE

I've often wondered why my dear friend David Schoffman abandoned his thriving career as a visual artist in favor of becoming the principal archivist of the Bibliothèque nationale d'études culturelles en marge (BNECM).

As a painter, David enjoyed the kind of rare fame that appoints cultural vedettes with unparalleled prestige. A fixture in the world of ArtFairs, Museum galas, auction houses, galleries, casinos, penthouses, governmental offices, sheikhdoms and nearly every other cathedral of conspicuous wealth, David seemed to have had it all. Though his work was uneven his style was unmistakable and for nearly three decades Schoffman coasted the canals of consumption like a gilded gondola.

Then, one day in the early aughts, it was announced in a modest small-print ad in Le Monde that David Schoffman would assume the position of BNECM's archiviste en chef , taking the place of the legendary scholar of 16th century Burgundian tapestries and manuscripts, Jean-Chlomo Angoulème.   

Honestly, I can't picture David being happy so far away from the bright lights of art stardom but I guess the pressure simply wore him out. 

A HUMBLE REASSESSMENT

My good, dear, flawed friend, David Schoffman has served as my eyes and ears, tracking the cultural climate of sunny southern California. Our arrangement goes back several decades and I am pleased to report that we are experiencing the dramatic effects of profound Climate Change.

For years we Parisians had dismissed the west coast of the United States as a tepid backwater of middlebrow mumbo jumbo, a mosh pit of pedestrian bromides masquerading as art. I'm pleased that this is no longer the case.

Schoffman has been urging me for the better part of the year to start listening to the Los Angeles podcaster Timmy Black. Having no idea what a 'podcaster' was, I dismissed his suggestion as just another endorsement for some new but ultimately fugitive trend.

Boy was I wrong!!!  

DAVID SCHOFFMAN: MOTORMOUTH

YES, I DIRECTED THIS VIDEO

NO, I HAD NO CREATIVE INPUT

ART IS HELL

To remint a hackneyed cliché, sometimes truth is more frivolous than fiction. My dear Los Angeles comrade David Schoffman seems to have single-handedly resurrected early modernism's infatuation with criminality.

Not since the days of Jean Genet and John-Paul Sartre has the frisson of transgression been so acute.

It seems that David has been combing the underworld, employing the skills of con men the way his colleagues exploit the eager ambitions of unpaid interns.

Somehow Schoffman got his hands on one of three extant copies of Nel Mondo Gramo, the famous 18th century progenitor of today's graphic novel. This eccentric visual rendering of Dante's Inferno has been erratically circulating through the antiquarian world for years. 

David claims his to be the finest and cleanest one.

But it doesn't stop there!

With the lucky panache of a true post-modernist, Schoffman "hired" a well known check-floating passport forger to reproduce, page for page, this precious document.

To make matters even more hilarious, he has exhibited his counterfeit manuscript under the dubious cover of Dadaist pranksterism.

I envy the American art world! Over in the States, literally anything goes ...