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.