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!!