PROGRESS (OR PERISH)

While sincerity is the highest form of intellectual treachery, when it comes the ragtag denizens of the unregulated art world the unleveling impact of legitimate insight rarely goes unpunished. The sanctions inflicted upon the thoughtful and the discerning can be draconian or worse. 

 

Nobody likes a smartypants.

 

Aloïs Gerstedes had outlived his critics. As a young refugee fleeing the Nazis, Gerstedes arrived in the United States during an American golden age of ideas. At Columbia University his professors included Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro and Doris Killhany.

 

As an outspoken progressive he was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) where he steadfastly refused to cooperate. As a consequence Gerstedes found it nearly impossible to pursue his academic work and ended up teaching art history in a public high school in Queens. (Yes, they used to teach art history in public high schools!)

 

Mr. Gerstedes was my teacher. 

 

Having survived both Hitler and Senator Joseph McCarthy the New York State Department of Education's 1983 Pedagogy and Advanced Training Standards (PATS) were not about to defeat the brilliant and stubborn Gerstedes.

 

Imagine, after years of soaring lectures on Huzinga, Burckhardt, Berenson and Warbug, field trips to downtown Manhattan to visit the studios of some his artist friends (yes! I met Donald Judd!) and bringing into the classroom distinguished guest speakers like Clement Greenberg and Denny Albatos, Mr. Gerstedes was asked to adjust his curriculum in order to accommodate the (since discredited) "Pleager and Roth Cognitive and Analytical Skill Building Rubric." 

 

Suddenly Mr. Gerstedes was no longer allowed to refer to "The Waning of the Middle Ages" because it was deemed "overly assertive, biased and complex." Professionals visiting his classrooms had to be properly vetted and were only allowed to speak if they received PATS certified training. Art studios were no longer deemed as "appropriate" field trips since the educational value of contemporary art was considered questionable.

 

Mr. Gerstedes quit - or was fired, depending on the telling - and moved to his beloved Tuscany to retire among the tinted hills and scented vines. While he spent his final years writing and painting lovely scenic watercolors New York State rescinded PATS and replaced it with the national standards of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and now The Common Core. The public schools have gutted most of its arts programs and those that remain are mired in the bureaucratic jargon of the Industrial/Educational Complex.

 

But that's okay. Museum attendance is at record levels, especially among school children who are now encouraged to look at all manner of works of art and to talk thoughtfully about their feelings.  

 

 

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.