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.
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.
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.
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