MY MONEY AND MY MOUTH

Unfortunately, being an artist in Los Angeles is incompatible with being anything but a liberal. If you tell someone that you’re in favor of the death penalty or that you’re dubious of climate change or that you have a mad crush on Ben Carson they look at you as if you’re a day too late on your meds.

Most of my ‘friends’ lean further left than Lenin and those who don’t flutter somewhere between Noam Chomsky and Hugo Chávez.

It’s funny how all my ambitious artist pals never tire of fantasizing about art fairs and auction houses. These very same socialists would trade a kidney for the privilege of having their work sell for six-figures at Gagosian or Pace. When they’re not comparing the Republican Party to a blood-sucking scurvy they’re calculating their chances of entering the secondary art market.

I suppose it’s fairly easy to be a leftist when you’re broke but what’s difficult is maintaining a political position consistent with your professional aspirations. Put more plainly, I never met an artist who didn’t want to get rich.

Why else would they enter a vocation where the primary objective is to produce hand-made, one-of-a-kind luxury items?

Well, I admit it! I enjoy the finer things and I don’t appreciate the welfare cheating pacifists who would recycle soiled toilet tissue if there were a bin in the bathroom. I’m proud that I’m in the business of making lovely pictures for an upper-crust clientele. Frankly, I want the same lifestyle that my collectors enjoy and I will do anything that it takes to achieve that goal!

It’s no secret how I feel and so among my colleagues I’m either treated like an idiot or like a leper.

And hey … Am I the only one out there that thinks Scott Walker is cute??

THE PRINCE(SS)

The first time I met the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman I was awed, humbled, smitten and terrified.

Schoffman and me, (date deliberately forgotten)

The next time  I saw him I nearly threw up.

I met him through well-intentioned friends who thought it was in my best interest to attach myself to an established older artist who could both mentor me and connect me with otherwise inaccessible professional opportunities.

These well-meaning friends all agreed upon Schoffman thinking that as a middle-aged married guy with three kids and a young beautiful wife (the choreographer Adelenne Laurenti) he was unlikely to hit on me too heavily and more likely to help me without the typical oily quid pro quos.

I’d always admired Schoffman’s work and I told him so over the phone when we arranged out first meeting at his big beauty loft on a walk street in Venice Beach. Schoffman lived at the time in Beverly Hills and used his loft strictly for painting. He had a staff of three full-time assistants and a part-time office manager named Chi who I could swear wasn’t a day older than fifteen.

The studio was filled with small jewel-like oil paintings – I learned later that they were part of his legendary 100-paneled polyptych The Body is His Book – and though the pieces were fairly impressive there was something depressing in seeing so many repetitious images crowded on his moldy walls like restless congregants in a megachurch.

Schoffman was the perfect southern (Californian) gentleman on that first brief encounter and we agreed to meet the following evening for dinner to discuss the possibility of joining his small staff as a grant writer and bookkeeper.

Why powerful men in this day and age still assume their so-called droit du seigneur I’ll never know but suffice it say the evening was terribly awkward and by the time I stumbled home (well, I wasn’t about to pass up a free meal and a couple of very very decent bottles of wine just because some old fart insisted on pawing me like a cat) I had lost all respect both for Schoffman and for the whole enterprise of contemporary art.

Much to my astonishment, a few months later a photo appeared all over social media that so misrepresented me and my relationship to that rakish lowlife that to this day I still have to explain to people that it is not in the least how it appears.

It was an early lesson in practical feminism. I ended up working for the guy for a about six or seven months. I kept him on a short leash of flirtation and withdrawal. He introduced me to enough important people to get me started on my career and as soon as I had enough of my own momentum I dropped him like a gum wrapper.

Now I’m in a whole different level of play. Schoffman was like community theater compared to where I’m hobnobbing now. If the name Gustav Oligrecht means nothing to you than either you’ve been living under a rock or you’re somehow ambivalent about the world of art fairs and blue chip collectors.

Oh, and David … if you happen to be reading this …

L’chaim and thanks for the memories!

Passionate and Convulsive

One of the great things about New York City is the vibrant and dynamic theater world of Off-Off Broadway. But one of the truly exciting wonders of this terrific metropolis is the untidy, eccentric and often hermetic universe of Off-Off-Off Broadway. It was in one of those far-flung marginal venues that I recently witnessed something that even the visionary inventor of The Theater of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud would not have anticipated.

at the theater

Winter Concert by the Estonian-American feminist public intellectual, Orestia Shestov is an inspired work of art. Loosely configured around the Völuspá or The Prophecy of Völva, Shestov’s new work is a tragic, voluptuary, sado-sexual urban legend that follows the three protagonists, Edo, Brigitte and Bruce, through a purgatorial cesspool of dissipation, redemption and ultimately, hopeless recidivism.

The piece is graphic and brash and clearly not for the faint of heart. I wouldn’t recommend taking your parents or using it as a venue for a first date. It challenges all convention and comically transgresses all norms of Judeo-Christian morality.

The sets, by the young New York painter, Linnart Jem, are exquisite precisely for their complete lack of subtlety. The music, which is live, is provided by the Brooklyn based punk/polka band Pierś.

There are two performances a week: Wednesdays at 8 PM and Saturdays at 7. The theater, a converted matzo factory is called The Elder von Musil Center for the Performing Arts and is located on Harrison Aveneue in University Heights.

It closes at the end of the month and I highly, highly recommend it.