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.

LOOKING AT ART WITH SPARK: NUMBER 41

There's a very special West Coast form of domesticated cool. Every time I visit a gallery, art museum or art fair in southern California I imagine opening up a micro-brewery or inventing some new recipe for double-yeast artisanal egg bread. 

Don't get me wrong. Living the past four years in Williamsburg I'm no stranger to countercultural commodification. Together with black and white cookies, onion bagels and pizza, branding bohemia is something of a New York City specialty. 

But there's something about the Pacific Ocean that bevels any edge that might survive among the fringe.

I was recently in Los Angeles covering yet another Art Fair, this one taking place in an impossibly lit former airport hanger in Santa Monica. I was reminded of Duchamp's famous complaint about the redundant beauty of nature. Every single work in that overly capacious space looked, smelled and tasted like "Art." 

Beastiality XXI, Youseff Zved, 2014

 From Youseff Zved's Beastiality paintings to Maristella Lvov's 'Redwood' holograms the walls were replete with that icy self-consciousness of hip, academic detachment. Even Eckel Moonse's typically transgressive videos looked like infomercials as they were projected in high definition on monumental razor-thin liquid crystal screens.

One notable exception was the work of the Paris-based artist Currado Malaspina. His new series of large works on paper, taxonomie dix-Neuf, are sly, private, poetic enigmas that deal with the arbitrary coding of language and the proto-humanization of signs.

taxonomie dix-Neuf N.14, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Malaspina's hot flame of disjunctive ambiguity felt conspicuously out of place hung next to the cool chic work of his contemporaries. But then again, Currado has always been such a square.