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.