THE RANCOROUS POLITICS OF MEDIOCRITY

Harps of Heaven editor in chief Dahlia Danton

Like hysteria and influenza, disgruntlement among scribes is contagious. When the stakes are truly inconsequential tempers tend to flare like bottle rockets. As a fair weather contributor to The Harps of Heaven, that petulant west coast arts and culture journal that reads more like an elevated Page Six than a serious intellectual document, I have been long witness to the slow boil of insurrection disrupting the ion ratio of their editorial office.   

Maybe it was inspired by the implosion of The New Republic or merely the consequence of too many hot toddies at the Christmas party, suffice it to say, there's big trouble beneath the palms.

Rivals Schoffman and Macfadyen in a rare moment of détente

The long standing enmity between Los Angeles painter David Schoffman and Maine's literary majordomo Nim Macfadyen is well known. A minor dispute that has distilled over the years into a fine fermented hatred has turned editor Dahlia Danton into the Ban Ki-moon of the art world. Few seem to understand the genesis of their mutual aversion but I've heard from one insider that it has something to do with furniture.

And as if that's not bad enough, at a recent meeting with their board of directors (which includes such luminaries from the techie world like Arvinda Mataba of SmartSocks, Kim Takiwati from MilkMilk.com and PlantIt's CFO Stephanie Shorenburg), it was decided to shift the focus of the journal away from hard arts journalism and more toward a dinner-theater potpourri of idle gossip, celebrity parenting advice and self-help book reviews. 

If the rumors turn out to be true Harps stalwarts like Sophia Lagrimar, Clement Digby, Orestia Shestov and Currado Malaspina have all resigned in protest. Macfadyen, whose unhealthy fascination with his divinely demanding editor is legend has decided, against all logic, to remain loyal. 

Also clinging to the hull of this sinking junk
is the flailing David Schoffman. 

Why?

Who knows ...

  

THE PEN IS MEEKER THAN THE SWORD AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE

Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson famously issued the naive injunction stating that "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" but that was in an age before Gawker.

Today it is no great distinction to be hacked, exposed, appropriated, impersonated, outed, eavesdropped, photobombed, tagged or retweeted. The most egregious sin of the 21st century is to be deemed so inconsequential as to be ignored.

We trade these days in "clicks' and without a lot of them you might as well retreat to your rotary phone and your typewriter.

Or even worse, your pen.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable subject of my embarrassing ignorance.

Am I the last art critic to have written about the recently published Letters of Currado Malaspina Volume I 1970 - 1985? Damn! I didn't know that the guy even wrote letters! Who the hell writes letters anyway?!

Well, while I'm working on writing my review (the book is 900 hefty pages with footnotes) I'll have to leave you with this classic video (though I hadn't seen it myself until yesterday!)

WHAT A TURKEY!

My cousin Tanya has about 2000 followers on Twitter.

 

 

I know that's not terribly impressive but to me it seems incredible. You see, when we were kids, my parents used to bribe me in order to get me to play with her. She always had this wonderful talent for alienating people.

It's not that she was ugly (though she was far from pretty - I think the proper term of art back then was that she was 'plain'). And she wasn't especially mean or at least she wasn't any meaner than the rest of us. I think she just gave off this invisible disagreeable indiscernible aura that was nonetheless unmistakably palpably and annoyingly bad.

 

Now that she's in her twenty's and is over-educated and under-employed and since she never fully outgrew her ability to repel the people around her she has embraced social media with grateful and ravenous dedication. 

Though (or because) her observations, pensées and
aperçus are dull and predictable and are rarely about anything even remotely approaching consequence she manages to attract loyal devotées who eagerly await her every quip.

She started working out recently (did I mention that she was always somewhat dumpy) and I have to say that after shedding 30 extraneous pounds she does look a lot more fetching, at least from behind.

 

With her new body has come a new wardrobe and her double-jointed dexterity with her cell phone has enabled her to approach the tricky art of the postable selfie with mastery and ingenuity.

 

 

But honestly -

 

My parents still have to bribe me to join her and her family for Thanksgiving.

THE FINAL COFFIN NAILS

I recently fell in with a small gaggle of fairly disreputable artists whose work, though marginal and at times fairly sentimental, nonetheless effectively remind us of the lamentable yet irreversible death of painting.

All associated with the the Southern California Figurative Art Collective or SCFAC, these guys -and they're mostly guys - consider themselves the best and last bastion of artistic integrity and craft. Far from Luddite, these fellas never met a digital photograph they didn't love. They literally cream in their collective jeans at the appearance of any new electronic graphic gizmo or picture enhancing app. Where they differ from most techno-nerds is in their obnoxious evangelism.

Yahweh Was Here, acrylic on wood panel, Gary C. Crest 2013

Gary C. Crest, a thirty year-old former fitness trainer, has a thing for churches. With bright acrylic paint which he redundantly shmears with the loving disdain of a gravy-stained deli man, Crest falls on the decadent side of Saenredam and Hendrick van Vliet. Known more as a teacher than as an artist, his work is little known outside a small circle of smitten sophomores and sympathetic family members.

Cute Children, oil on linen, Jimmy Ballarta 2014

Jimmy Ballarta is, I'm afraid, of an entirely different level of magnitude. It's been suggested by more acerbic observers than myself that Ballarta should go into partnership with a dentist, such is the confectionery nature of his hideous grisailles. One can only hope that this grievous offender against Western Civilization looses all his own teeth save for the one that aches him.

Sean Har-Nof desrves a few grace notes for his choice of subject matter.

Danton #73, acrylic on paper, Sean Har-Nof 2014

With the obsession of a Cézanne he has chosen a motif and has produced literally hundreds of variations upon his limited theme. His Mont St. Victoire is none other than my beautiful and erudite colleague Dahlia Danton. But unlike the great master of the late 19th century, Har-Nof lacks both vision and talent.

Why Danton agreed to this indignity only thickens the enigma behind this brazen waste of paint.

Knowing Danton, she probably thought it would boost her career.

Sorry Dahlia ... wrong pony ...

CHICKS WHO STICK TO THE SCRIPT

Of all the tired unforgiving exhibitions of buttery, soft-serve erotica masquerading as serious art these days, the most interesting one this season has been a small intimate affair staged in L.A.'s new Gallerie Intestin on Chung King Road.

Misleadingly titled Toward a New Feminist Aesthetic, the exhibition features work by three prominent California women artists whose perspectives though appearing to be in radical opposition are in reality predictably in synch.

Penelope Mishnaic, 2014

Penelope Mishnaic comes to her subject through a brutal autobiographical self-exhumation with powerfully inert images of raw, unappetizing intimacy. Her premise seems to originate in the assertion that orgasms, in her words, "have no practical function and are therefore best consigned away from the romantic and into the transactional."

I think it best to leave this dubious manifesto alone and move to the next artist.

Dahlia Danton, 2014

Dahlia Danton, known primarily for her highly provocative and influential online journal The Harps of Heaven, has a somewhat different take on sexuality. To Danton, romantic love in the post-feminist age is just another compartmentalized expression of empowerment that is easily relagated to the general category of prosaic inactivity. It seems that in Danton's rendering, coitus and car maintenance are of equal import and to privilege one over the other is a meek capitulation toward male dominance. The exception to this, of course, is the Sapphic trajectory to which, as a militant bisexual, she graphically advocates with her tender watercolors and less than tender published essays.

Shira Van Wyken

The third artist, and probably the most interesting of the group, is Shira Van Wyken, known mostly through her one-woman theatrical productions that deal with trauma, violence and humor. She is represented in the show by a monumental video loop of female circus performers interacting with male spectators. Ultimately, I'm not exactly sure what any of it means but it is refreshingly entertaining and completely free from any heavy-handed advocacy or whining womanly claptrap.

FORE!

One of the finest critics of our time recently passed away. The fact that he left this world with so little fanfare is testament to his great humility and does not by any means suggest that he was a marginal pedant working on the fringes of academia.

Dr. Musil Moosbrugger did indeed live on the margins, at least by any standard of contemporary celebrity. He was a beloved professor at both Brown and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and though he published no less than 22 books on a myriad of subjects, few outside a small circle of specialists and former students have ever heard of him.

I recently met one of his former students, the Los Angeles painter, David Schoffman. 

I was interviewing Schoffman on the subject of unrequited ambition, or more specifically, failure. I was particularly interested in the types of failures that occur on an operatic scale.

Mention epic disappointment to anyone in the artworld and the name David Schoffman always comes up. For the past twelve years he has been working on a one-hundred paneled polyptych that is still nowhere near completion. With his weakening eyesight, hand tremors and frequent battles with gout and gallstones, Schoffman's life's work will undoubtedly be a looming question of what if.

I learned from Schoffman that Moosbrugger as well had worked for many years on an impossible project that was left incomplete at the time of his death. Like David, Moosbrugger deliberately set himself unreasonable goals in order to assure near certain disappointment. It's called Diotima's Disease after the famous female philosopher responsible for the concept of Platonic love. The terror of the unconsummated act is a thrill only a true romantic is capable of. It's like playing seventeen holes of golf or leaving the concert hall just before the start of Ode To Joy.


Few are worthy of such heroic collapse, such stellar nonfulfillment, such negligence and dereliction. 

To the likes of Moosbrugger, Schoffman and countless others it's a life's work worthy of our deepest pity.  

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

My friend, the director Itai Mosconi, recently set me up with his girlfriend's cousin. Let's call her Penny.

We met for coffee at some chalkboardy joint in Greenpoint and the first thing Penny says to me is "Are you on WeChat?"

"What's WeChat?" I ask, confident in my easy assimilation of everything techie.

"What's WeChat!?" she virtually hollers, turning every I-Phone in the place in my direction hoping to record an epic argument to post on YouTube. "It's only the biggest stand-alone messaging platform in the world!"

Who knew?

Penny is sweet.

No, sweet isn't the right word. It's actually the wrong word. She's anything but sweet. She is smart, she's pretty, she's fit, she's even nice but she definitely is not sweet.

She's one of those girls that says aww alot, lifting her inflection upward and squeezing an extraneous syllable out towards the end. She usually does this when she sees a puppy or a toddler wearing a hat. I've actually witnessed her talking on the phone to one of her friends where she offered a dazzling seven consecutive aww's in a row!

Penny and I have had some really good times. I've taken her to a Mets game, Shakespeare in the Park (I waited six hours on line in the rain for tickets), a couple of art openings and even a poetry reading. She does a lot of texting when we're out but so does everybody else so it's a bit silly to complain.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm carping or anything but when she isn't saying aww, Penny begins every, and I mean every sentence with the word so followed by you know.  (actually, to be fair, sometimes she reverses the order)

Each plodding thought prefaced with what amounts to an intellectual disclaimer fills me with such confusion and casts me into such a somber state of cognitive isolation that I feel abandoned and distraught.

I made the mistake of sharing this with Penny because, like I said, she's smart and she's nice but she completely took it the wrong way and called me an 'elitist f*ck.' (Did I mention she's is a native New Yorker?)

  

We haven't spoken or seen each other for about three weeks but she did text me the other day and told me I was cute and that she missed me.

Aww!

THE HARD CHOICES OF AN HONEST CRITIC

Malaspina

There's a great line from Currado Malaspina, the whimsical, somewhat marginal contemporary French painter that goes something like this:

"We extort from the man the child within only to badger the man with childish false tribute"

(I think I got that right. The original reads "Nous extorquer de l'homme dans l'enfant que pour harceler l'homme avec un faux hommage enfantin" and that's the best I could do with three years of high school French.)

I think what he means (and one is never too sure what Malaspina means) is that when we become adults we foolishly wager on a sagacity that rarely ever arrives. (Case in point: Currado Malaspina).

Palimpseste (Le livre), Currado Malaspina 2014

I'd like to think that I will remain open to wisdom and radical revision when I'm as old as Currado. Unfortunately, the world of art journalism frowns upon openness and intellectual reevaluation.

Typically a critic stakes his or her ideological claim and never dares budging from it. It's a matter of paycheck versus dispassion, a steady byline versus purgatorial obscurity. Let's face it, there's not a lot of work out there for art critics so it's wise to find one's niche and stick to it. 

My parents always warned me that the adult world was one of compromise and accommodation. I guess I'll just tuck myself in as the "curious curmudgeon with a soft spot for kitsch."



Promiscuous mercenary and humorless purist  were already taken when I got into this business and the fallback friendly philistine just seemed way too easy.

NEVER SAY I KANT

Once I finished school my plan was very simple. I would move to New York, hang up my shingle and become an overnight success.

 

The specific avenue of success scarcely mattered. What was important was the pursuit of a prestigious, high-profile occupation, preferably in the arts but not necessarily limited to it.

 

Money was secondary - stature, however, was vital.

Against my better instincts I hired what they called at the time a vocational consultant, which sounds a bit like a parole officer which explains why they're now called career coaches.

We went through my résumé and scrupulously analyzed my strengths and my weaknesses. The fact that I went to art school was seen both as an advantage and as a liability. Since I concentrated on Critical Theory at the expense of the more traditional studio classes my skill set was seen as severely limited. On the other hand my graduate dissertation on the polylogic of disjunctional banalities in advertising proved to be extremely useful especially since I hit the job market at the height of the recession.

At $110 an hour I couldn't really afford too much advice and the few blind alleys and wayward suggestions on offer indicated to me that maybe a parole officer would have been more useful.

At an Occupy Wall Street afterparty in some guy's loft on Franklin Street I met a fashion agent who had just finished working on an anthology of museum exhibition essays from the 70's and 80's. She told me how amazed she was at how the photographer was able to make all these nerdy looking curators appear so interesting and sexy. The publishers knew that the appeal of a book of this kind would be extremely narrow and so they tried to push for a more glamorous look.

 

A light went off in my head and the next day I got in touch with a former classmate of mine who was working as an assistant at Vogue. We arranged to "borrow" some fancy lights and a few backdrops and after I hastily put together a few writing samples we put together a promotional package that landed me my first writing job.

 

   

I've been working as an art critic and independent curator ever since and whenever someone asks me how to get started in this business I always tell them that prose is not the only appropriate place for soft focus.

SCHOOLED

Gentle, Gentile Genitalia no.6, Spark Boon '09

Before I came to the terrifying realization that I had neither the talent nor the stamina to become a full-time visual artist I followed the standard post-graduate protocol and crawled up every anus within spitting distance of a gallery. I showed up at every opening (why don't they serve food at these things anymore?), attended every workshop (my favorite was called How To Be Noticed and Find Representation Without Geting Dirty presided over by two lovely women painters, neither of whom had any gallery affiliation), contributed to every silent auction (does anyone remember Artists Against ADHD?), sat through countless lectures (where else could I hope to make a dent in my sleep deficit?) and endured every humiliating studio visit no matter how visually opaque and culturally illiterate my guests happened to be (can you imagine asking an author after reading their novel 'so, what's your book about'?).

Gentle, Gentile Genitalia no.11, Spark Boon '09

By far, the most mortifying experience I ever had was being selected as a finalist for the Joseph Choynski Memorial Fellowship for Emerging New York Painters and Sculptors. The Choynski is terribly hard to get and the politics are notoriously brutal. The jurors rotate from year to year and their identity is supposed to remain secret. (Finding out who the Choynski jurors are is something of a blood sport and is only marginally easier than being awarded the actual grant).

from right to left: Chimay and Boudouin (photo courtesy of Galerie Gaufre)

The year I made it to the finals the nameless, faceless adjudicators turned out to be the famous Belgian conceptual art team Baudouin & Chimay.

The fact that I had gotten as far as I did in the vetting process had little to do with my work and more to do with the fact that I was dating Boudouin's mistress who parenthetically was Chimay's sister and who in turn was the estranged wife of the CFO of Côte d'Or chocolates - (the Flemish, it seems, have an even greater taste for les Liasons Dangereuses than the French).

Gentle, Gentile Genitalia no.29, Spark Boon '09

 When the two of them came to my studio to see my work in person they weren't simply nonplussed but were violently and vociferously repelled. Who, they asked me, did I think I was churning out stir-fried neo-neoexpressionism while the world was collapsing under the weight of American neo-neocolonialism. Could I possibly be, they wondered with what seemed like genuine concern, unaware of contemporary art's ironic imperatives? Was I somehow trying to be both apolitical and sincere?

Was I, they kept asking over and over again, serious?!

The fellowship went to some young gal from Long Island who did colorful portraits of farm animals wearing clown suits. 

It turned out that Boudouin and Chimay had secretly taped my studio visit and featured it in their 2011 Whitney video installation Cowering Yet Creative: A Discourse on Artistic Behavior.

They received a MacArthur last year.

The identities of the jurors remains a secret.

  

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: TOO MUCH SUN

I love the L.A. art scene.

Not that it's any good - nothing trailed by the term scene could possibly be taken seriously -but because it has no conscience and even less history. Think Schoffman or Danton, two local luminaries whose respective careers would be unimaginable on the East Coast. Unfastened to Europe and the Modernist narrative, Los Angeles artists never shy away from having a really good time at the expense of any encumbering gravitas.

West Coast big shots Dahlia Danton and David Schoffman

I recently returned from one of my periodic grand tours of California and I was struck by one new artist in particular.

Julien Léthéens, a Belgian expatriate who has been living out there for the past several years, has ironically become the quintessential L.A. artist. His recent work, currently included in the MOCA exhibition Sense, Sensual, Sportif is such a bland regurgitation of everything from  Basquiat's graffitio, French Affichisme and Carpentier's paper bags that it all oddly works by the sheer force of its unapologetically derivative chutzpah.

Blind Drawings on the Hollywood Walk of Fame #16, Julien Léthées, 2014

Léthées apparently has a photographic memory for faces, or so the press releases claim. He can look at a person for just a few seconds and calmly render a perfect likeness without ever lifting his eye from the page. A talent better suited for Barnum and Baily than for the Beaubourg, in Los Angeles, a gimmick like that always has great currency.

Especially when its subject is celebrity.

What this Flemish phenom has been doing is parading down Hollywood's famous Walk of Fame with a small army of assistants and documentarians, setting up an easel and making blind contour portraits of each and every star underfoot.

He's got three galleries hawking these things and with his thespian good looks and sexy French accent he's got a pilot in production that according to Variety is "an unusual hybrid of high-art Discovery and low self-esteem Fox Reality."

And to think I could have stayed home and covered the Carl Andre retrospective.

DAMN RIGHT AND LEFT OUT SIDES OF THE BRAIN

Some people claim that creativity can be taught.

Christian rock trio The Ipso Factos

The truth is, creativity is unlearned, wrenched from our brains during childhood by excessive socialization. Any attempt to redress this loss in adulthood is practically futile.

This may be bad news for society at large but terrific news for the ever-expanding self-help industry that preys upon urban professionals indentured to their mind-numbing routines.

Only a desperately lost soul would pay good money to sit in a redundantly lit conference room to hear some clean-cut loudmouth talk about the 'seven steps toward spontaneity.' It's like going to a seminar to learn how to become tall. The train, I'm afraid, has already left the station.

As anyone with half a brain will tell you, cranial hemispheres have about as much to tell us about how we use our imaginations as tea leaves, Tarot cards and Ouija boards. 

The simple truth is that creativity comes from a near total lack of compulsion to ask any 'higher authority' for permission. (Again, think of children).

I've been commissioned by Dahlia Danton, editor of the online arts journal The Harps of Heaven to conduct a series of interviews with artists, writers and composers about their own personal creative processes. My first interview was with Gerhard Arroga, former lead singer of the Christian punk band The Ipso Factos. An edited transcript of our discussion will appear in The Harps in a forthcoming issue.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 121

I've been on the West Coast covering the art scene in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

Here's a summery of the best L.A. had to offer this month:

 On the Westside, Chi-Ann Briggs animates the

The Wound That Seduces, Chi-Ann Briggs, 2014

will against itself with a sprawling installation that pits memory with an almost alpine effort at self-sublimation. Her first one-woman show at Galax Turnkey in Culver City signals the emergence of an eccentric talent whose use of language at the service of the destabilization of meaning has the potential for redefining poetic space in a post-sculptural ecosystem.

Tamara Udon by contrast, takes the idea of conventional meaning systems quite literally. Her show at Montrose Lucida at the Pacific Design Center focuses on fluid narrative structures filtered through the prism of reality television script doctoring. 

  

Tell It To Me Again, Tamara Udon, 2013

With the use of documentary footage, Udon's videos place the question of dis-identity in the foreground of an architectural reification at the expense of a deliberately disruptive impersonation of authenticity. Though much of the work is difficult to watch, repeated viewings are generally rewarded with the subtle complexities of its baroque format.

Palm #2213, Gary Mint 2002 -2014

Gary Mint's Encyclopedia of Palms is probably one ot the most interesting shows I've seen in Los Angeles in a long time. Compiled over a twelve year period, Mint set out to document every palm tree in Los Angeles County. As most astute viewers know but what few tourists care to admit is that the tree that is commonly associated with Beverly Hills is not indigenous to the region. Imported from New Zealand, the trees thrive in spite of their dislocation. By carefully chronicling every example of this trans-continental graft Mint calls attention to a form of vegetative immigration as a proxy for our own condition of urban alienation. 

The work can be seen at Lover's Lane in West Hollywood. 

All three exhibitions are examples of the growing ingenuity and self-confidence of an emerging group of Southern Californian artists who have bartered their expensive M.F.A.'s for a more sophisticated, less academic relationship to post-post modernism.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: Number 101

The agon is as old as the agora and just as tiger fish swallow the minnow so too with artists. It is a time honored tradition for the graves of the so-called masters to be desecrated by pretenders to the throne. That some are not merely pretenders, only history can arbitrate, but among the living, artistic insurrections are a blood sport like no other.

Basil Zukofsky in his Greenpoint studio 2014

Take the case of Basil Zukofsky, the twenty-five year old enfant terrible of the M.F.A. postpartum set. While still at Yale he reportedly infuriated his professors by scheduling his extensive New York exhibitions in May, making his work unavailable for the semester's final review. "Don't worry," he once told a dumbstruck adjunct, "The Times said the work was fine."

The Recovery of Beauty, acrylic on masonite, Basil Zukofsky, 2014

There is no denying that Zukofsky has talent, his recent offerings at Volta NY were evidence enough of his raw and visceral abilities. Ideas, of course, are a different story. Some find it perfectly acceptable when an artist openly usurps another's concepts and makes it their own but most would agree that outright, unabashed larceny is an unpardonable offense even among thieves.

The overworked axiom that there is no such thing as bad publicity never seemed more justified when it was revealed that Zukofsky's monumental The Recovery of Beauty a 24 foot wide behemoth of allusion and appropriation was in fact a mere enlargement of Los Angeles painter David Schoffman's earlier and more intimate The Architect's Will.

The Architect's Will, oil on linen, David Schoffman 2003

Zukofsky shrugged off the allegations implausibly explaining that any similarity to Schoffman's work was merely coincidental. Citing the unconscious imprint of Ronnie Mack's She's So Fine on George Harrison's My Sweet Lord, the young painter claimed he was innocent of outright imitation. 'Inanimate homage' was the phrase he (or his legal team) coined to explain the uncanny similarities. The ensuing scandal only elevated Zukofsky's stock while the elder statesman Schoffman was depicted in the press as a bitter curmudgeon attempting to awkwardly bask in the young art star's reflected phosphorescence.

And so while Zukofsky's Recovery of Beauty adjusts to its new climate controlled surroundings in the Latif Pavillion of Contemporary Art in Dubai Schoffman's Architect is probably still languishing in some dark corner of the Beverly Hills home of Gina and Howard Rakosi where it has quietly resided for over a decade.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 77

The flight from New York to Paris is just a couple of hours longer than the flight to L.A. so when my editor gave me the choice of covering Art Los Angeles Contemporary or the Paris/Nice bicycle race it was, as they say in neighboring Belgium a pas de cerveau (trans. 'no brainer'). 

What I know about bicycle racing barely extends beyond what I've picked up peddling along the Manhattan waterfront with my regular posse of stock analysts and security traders. They told me to watch Germany's John Degenkolb and that while in Paris I should go to Dominique Bouchet and make sure to order the rack of lamb. I mention this to illustrate just how out of touch the Wall Street crowd is from the rest of us. To think that someone who makes a living writing art criticism would spend sixty bucks on a piece of meat even if it did come with polenta is more evidence than I'll ever need to see just how insulated these guys are.

But the sad and indisputable fact remains that it is they, my buddies in their ridiculous lycra bicycle tights, who are closer to the pulse of the art world than I'll ever be.

While sharing a couple of fabulous bottles of Pouilly Fumé with some Italian sportswriters I was reminded of just how marginal we arts professionals are with our expensive graduate degrees and fancy specializations. Here in Magny-Cours where the race just completed its third stage nothing could be further from the world of ideas. My Italian colleagues are bemused at best at the thought that someone would be willing to shell out 36 million euros on a stainless steel balloon dog. To them it's just another symptom of the madness of money. What gets them impressed (and their astonishment is truly contagious) is when a man can cycle over 1500 kilometers in a week's time and not collapse into a coma.  

Right before I left, my buddy Nathan, a market maker at Nyx Securities (can someone please tell me what a market maker makes) bought a small sculpture at an art fair in Madrid. It's by a young Catalan artist named Eddie Jiro who though well known in Europe is just beginning to make a name for himself in New York.

Probar mis Calzoncillos, mixed media, Eddie Jiro 2014

Without batting an eye, Nat paid 74,000 euro.

He thinks it was a bargain.

I did the research.

He's right.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 68

The fine art of photography is a frail craft crushed under the democratizing weight of the smart phone.

Only cataracted conservatives and technology infatuated Tories would deny this lamentable yet incontrovertible reality. For years we've been tipped off by Webster's with their recent inclusion of the term 'visual asset' as a feeble futuristic synonym for the word 'picture.'

One notable exception is the work of the French Canadian artist Jean-Marie Mikita.

Cecilia of Les Andelys, Ciba-Gel chrome print on linen, Jean-Marie Mikita 2013

Mikita's work, well-known for years in the francophone world, has only recently come to the critical attention of the New York art press. With his ironic meta-narrative critiques of the medium itself, the work bounces and distorts like a series of fun house mirrors steeped in Lacanian jouissance.  

Cecilia of Les Andelys which I recently saw in an exhibition at Fortune & Price, is a billiard table of rebounding references that call to mind the monumental still-lives of George Braque.

Mikita is certainly a talent worth watching. Whether he can remain vital while using the fossilized medium of photography is still an open question.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: THE CORPORATE CABARET VOLTAIRE

I recently attended a seminar called Mindfulness & Self Realization. The focus was on what was called "self-defeatism." It was hosted by the Milestone Colloquium, a company that specializes in what is known as the "Human Renovation" industry. Often overlooked by both economists and government officials alike this under-regulated industry generates somewhere between 300 and 700 million dollars a year.

The reason why I went was because the featured

Micah Carpentier, 1972

speaker was Roberto Carpentier-Katz, nephew of the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier. Katz is the executor of the Carpentier estate as well as the executive director of the Micah Carpentier Foundation in Barcelona. His credentials as a motivational speaker seemed dubious at best so I asked my editor Dolphy Cane to send me to Los Angeles to find out what this was all about.

I've long been fascinated by the developed world's obsession with personal growth and repair. While most of the planet is too preoccupied with the existential necessities of finding food and potable water, we in the West are unique in our preoccupation with happiness. The added enigma of Carpentier's involvement gave me the perfect opportunity to witness one of these forums first hand.

The workshop took place at one of those

nondescript corporate auditoriums with uncomfortable chairs, a scarcity of windows and a surplus of harsh florescent lighting. Carpentier's presentation was a boilerplate of recovery jargon, watered down Schopenhauer and a dog's breakfast of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy-lite. 

Things got interesting midway when he unexpectedly brought up his uncle. 

In 1972, shortly before his death, Carpentier published a marvelously strange pamphlet entitled The 48 Stations of Ecstasy. It was a satirical manifesto impishly written in the spirit of Dada. Long forgotten by all save for a few Carpentier scholars the work offers comic advice for the disquieted and the lovelorn. Arch recommendations like "create your future because the past can't be plagiarized" and "imagination is anti-democratic" are characteristic of this hilariously mocking compendium of empty aphorisms. 

That his nephew Roberto is now peddling his parody as a legitimate self-help manual would undoubtedly give the mischievous Micah a wicked, antic, artistic pleasure.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: No. 51

Of the seventy-nine insider trading convictions meted out since 2009, seventy-four of the convicted felons were high-profile art collectors. This amazing statistic had gone unnoticed until one of the remaining five philistines recently decided to curate a show.

Arjam Mahandraberg, date unknown

Arjam Mahandraberg, a former analyst for GRD London has put together one of the most unusual exhibitions of the season. If there are consistent threads of taste among the miscreants I will leave it to others to tease them out. To me, the only common denominators were the State of Connecticut and the price tags.

The unusual venue for the exhibition, a former boxing gym on Peck Slip in way downtown New York, is close enough yet far enough from Wall Street to allow the obvious ironies to marinate.

All the art in the show is for sale having been duly

Dirge, Currado Malaspina, 1998

confiscated by the Feds as ill gotten non-fungible assets. The arbitrary, almost callous installation of the extremely uneven work gives the show an upscale thrift store feel which is not altogether inappropriate. Pieces by artists as varied as Koons, Coswell, Malaspina and Katz can now be seen as a form of contraband giving their works a mutinous, innovative recalcitrance, a quality they so sorely lack on their own.

One leaves the exhibition with the distinct impression that if this is any evidence of the cultivation and taste that money buys then indeed crime does not pay.