ASTIQUER LE BOURGEOIS

Turn your life into a work of fiction.

That was the message restated ad nauseam at the First Annual Artists Conference on 21st Century Personal Branding Practices and Techniques.

Imagine a redundantly illuminated, overly air conditioned, brown ribbed synthetically carpeted, low-ceilinged acoustic-tiled conference room in a mid-size corporate business center steel frame glass and concrete ediface in the shadow of LAX filled with aspiring MFAed avant gardists whose only common denominator was a complete lack of irony.

But yes, this nightmare was real. I was there! I was sent by my editors to cover this unfortunate event and have since learned that without a particle of embarrassment, artists have now entered into the consumer class of the Self-Help and Actualization Movement.

And why not?

The wave of the future is in the past. Warhol's dystopian prediction of fame's fugitive democratization has come to full fruition. In this new world of Bold NewLeaders who will be left to be led?

As they jostled their way toward their uncomfortable seats these young, name-tagged artists seemed untroubled by this inconvenient arithmetical paradox.

My conclusion after attending this three-day seminar is not only that Dada is dead but like Tiananmen Square or a post-traffic school moving violation, it has been scrubbed from the official record.

All that said, I did pick up a few pointers on how to effectively monetize my blog!!

THREE MINUTES AND TWENTY-TWO SECONDS (3:22)

I've been told by more than one person that my essays have too many words. They assure me that they are very interested in my semi-regular disquisitions on art and ideas but that in the current marketplace of eyes and clicks, reading my vignettes takes up way too much time.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

They gently point to my prose and complain that I use too many adverbs and adjectives. They grumble that if a thought can be conveyed without a modifier why would I burden a reader whose time is presumably too valuable to be bothered by elements of style.

 It's arrogant of me, they continue, to expect a perfect stranger to struggle though polysyllabic, metrical sentences when a tiny tap away they can find beautiful, caption-less photos of hairless chests and form fitting underpants.

Of course I know they're right.

I am therefore taking this opportunity to introduce a new important feature on all my future screeds!

From now on I will include, next to the title, a reliable estimate of the time it will take the average reader to get through my short, little articles. I say reliable because I have purchased a terrific new app that calculates - based on levels of difficulty, length and subject matter - the amount of minutes and seconds it would take to read something from start to finish.

Factored into their brilliant algorithm are the potentially inhibiting learning disabilities that could slow a reader down. Through the gentle surveillance of "cookies" it can evaluate the reader's internet history and determine to what degree they have abraded their concentration through prolonged contact with foolish and entertaining websites. 

The reader can even personalize the algorithm's evaluation of their personal data by going into Settings and choosing between avid, apathetic, resilient, lazy, techie, techie 1, techie 2, grande, venti, technophobe, child, childlike, senior, stupid or recent college graduate!

I know this will make a huge difference and I hope, in this way, I can attract more and more readers and cultivate a growing cadre of loyal and devoted followers.

The Urgent Affair of Uselessness

WHAT A SUCKER ...

Phee Bureaux (watercolor by Currado Malaspina)

When, on the heels of Philip Roth and Paul Simon, the conceptual multimedia performance artist Phee Bureaux unexpectedly annonced his retirement the art world heaved a collective sigh of relief. Bureaux was one of those unclassifiable gadflies who while possessing an uncanny instinct for publicity managed to alienate a public whose love and trust he betrayed at the drop of his felt fedora.

Phee's work is satirical in the cruelest sense and his targets ranged from the barreled fish of celebrity and social media to the tenured academics who covered his theoretical ass for the past fifteen years.

People have likened him to the Los Angles artist David Schoffman but that gives the tiresome Schoffman too much credit. Bureaux in funnier, cuter and more interesting. A fairer comparison would be to Dahlia Danton but to delve into that complex affinity would take an entire doctoral dissertation.

With a discerning eye for detail Bureaux skewers our collective moral lassitude. From pot-heads to poets, bankers to beatniks, CEO's to saints, everyone has been in his cruel and cutting crosshairs.

He once did a piece called Jesus' Instagram with the predictable results. He learned that the noble heirs of the Prince of Peace were not above litigation, cyberbullying or even death threats. 

Even his strongest supporters were shocked by his Vine and YouTube blackface reenactments of Rothko's suicide. It appears that some things do remain sacred.

I for one will miss him - he has always been nice to me - but for my colleagues it's a different story.

This tasteless genius may very well be bluffing and baiting and waiting in the wings for a dramatic switch. There's even a rumor that he's behind the Trump campaign, the mother of all performance artworks. 

Come to think of it ... now it suddenly all makes sense.

Anagram, Phee Bureaux, 2016

Brilliant!!

CRISES MANAGEMENT

As if we need any additional proof that the contemporary condition of art consumption is closer to the World Wrestling Federation than it is to World Civilization, I was recently invited to take part in a professional symposium whose putative theme, as described in its title, was The Decline & Renaissance in the Art of the Now. However hopeful the cumbersome heading, the first question posed to the panelists deflated any possible claim on actual seriousness. Our ragtag assembly consisted of 2 critics, 3 academics, a curator, 4 collectors and a moderator whose chief qualification seemed to be that she was the former associate Style editor of Newsday. 

 "Who is today's absolute worst practicing artist?" 

It was like throwing fresh marrow at a kennel of puppies.

Shide Devenaux, oil on canvas, 2015

All the usual names came up - Koons, Schoffman, Hirst, Malaspina, Wool, Devenaux, Silvas etc. - and what ensued was a demoralizing frenzy of calumnious innuendo and oh-so-clever invective.

What could possibly be the purpose of such an inquiry beyond its sheer entertainment value? 

Though I have to confess that even I was taken in by the gales of mirthful schadenfreude.

Currado Malaspina, from The Baba Kama Sutra, 2016

"Malaspina's a fraud," our resident professor of interdisciplinary multimedia performance practice crooned to the approving crowd, "instead of suffering a genuine scandal, he bakes one into his work like an ungainly puppeteer."

I'm not at all certain how to unpack that clumsy mess of tangled metaphor but judging by the audience's uproarious reception I was in a minority position.

David Schoffman, from The Body Is His Book

Surprisingly it was Schoffman who came in for the most malicious remarks but I guess these are the wages of fame. Our resident curator spoke of the inconvenience of having to install a polyptych consisting of 100 panels. One of the collectors said it was completely unreasonable of an artist to insist upon the presentation of an entire work. "Even I don't have that kind of wall space," he said to the giggling crowd.

But it was my colleague, Sabrina Solavechick from The Art Newspaper who got the last laugh. During the Q&A she was asked if she thought quality was still a matter of important consideration at a time when the market is so heated and the critical community is so glutted by the Internet. 

Sabrina, who by any measure is a beautiful and elegant woman, merely took a long deep breath and irreverently let out what could only be described as a desperate cry for help.

TRY THIS ... IT MAY SURPRISE YOU!

A friend of mine - a guy I know from the gym who works for some tech firm in lower Manhattan - told me that about every six months or so, Human Resources sends some over-exuberant nerd with gelled hair and Elvis Costello glasses over to all the departments and conducts what they call a "quality of the workplace" seminar. They're mandatory, they invariably gum up the production schedule and nobody takes them seriously but besides that, he finds them harmless. The latest one was called The Picot Manchester Scan and it's available online. He told me it's really different but I honestly have no basis of comparison. Anyway, it was somewhat illuminating and I think it really nailed my character pretty accurately.

LOST BUT NOT FORGOTTEN - A CALL TO MY COLLEAGUES

From about 1972 to 1978 The Greighten Group was one of the most influential artistic collectives in the United States. Their reach far exceeded their output - together they may have staged three or four major exhibitions and published only a handful of manifestoes - but their lasting impact on the contemporary aesthetic discourse is remarkably durable.

The Greighton Group, 1977

Like many important movements initiated by young, relatively untested artists, the collective began as something of a prank. Named after an obscure Bosnian poet named Goren Tomislav, the group evolved from a coterie of pot smoking slackers into a highly disciplined and ideologically rigid guild of original thinkers.

Master Class, The Creighton Group, watercolor on paper, 1977

Deceptive and ingenious, the group produced intricate works that appeared on the surface as sober variations on conventional motifs but on closer reading turned out to be fulminating critiques of what they called "ersatz avant-garde retrenchment and retreat."

Though they were often accused of deliberate obscurantism, their ideas slowly gained currency, especially in Europe.

 And while they billed themselves as a collaborative, there is little doubt that as the members gradually succumbed to a form of inspirational fatigue the dominant conceptual instruments started landing in the lap of one man, Patrice Loukaeny.

Patrice Loukaeny as the Great Dictator, date unknown

The collective spirit frayed under the strain of Loukaeny's massive, some say megalomaniacal ego. Most of the members went on to various teaching jobs around the country with their own individual projects never living up to the promise of their youthful energy and idealism. 

Loukaeny disappeared for over a decade only to resurface in Los Angeles where he opened a small, trendy bakery specializing in tortes.

I am currently in the process of securing loans of many of their most important pieces for a retrospective slated for the spring of 2017 at the Greenspan Gallery at Apotolos College in  Coeur d'Alene.

I would appreciate any information from people familiar with these artists and their important work.

TRAGIC BUT NOT TIMELESS

My mother used to say that if you didn't have anything nice to say about a person it's best to keep one's mouth shut and refrain from saying anything at all.

My mom is a service rep for a mid-size electronics company so I suppose she has a point but if you're a New York art critic with any intention of paying your rent on time you may want to consider a few other options.

Dahlia Danton

Dahlia Danton over at The Harps of Heaven has, for some reason, assigned to me an assessment of the painter David Schoffman. At first I thought to myself, shouldn't she hand that over to someone in L.A.? Sure I know the guy's work, who doesn't? But I come in with a distinct regional bias against him, and she should know that.

Anyway, apparently they're planning an entire issue of The Harps devoted to Schoffman and I suppose she wants to throw all of us scribes into the soup.

So here goes.

First of all, I know he means well. His 100-paneled polyptych is probably one of the most ambitious and heroic painterly endeavors attempted these days. But that, of course, isn't saying a hell of a lot.

Yes, he's smart and yes, he is probably the most accomplished colorist of our day but this is the age of the sight-bite and complexity is just oh, so, 1950's.

I'm surprised his career has any traction out there in Los Angeles. Schoffman's labor intensive, obsessively detailed, lush disquisitions on pictorial space and form are so mismatched with the world of fast-paced show biz entertainment.

Sure, I know that Schoffman has a side career as an actor but honestly, he's no Marlon Brando by any stretch of the imagination.

And speaking of the imagination, why does he insist on being so obscurely original. Post-modernism is all about the derivative pastiche and when someone like Schoffman comes around with this sui generis nonsense it throws everyone into confusion.

At the end of the day, Schoffman, if he belongs anywhere at all it's at the end of the last century and even there he's about as fitting as a Châteauneuf-du-Pape with  a bag of flaming hot cheetos.

So forgive my candor when I say that the deep, beautiful and provocative work of David Schoffman is well past its sell by date. Put one of his images on an AARP tote bag but please, please, please, keep them out of the art galleries.

Or at least keep them in California.