Delivering a lecture at the Saur Center for Post-Graduate Studies attended mostly by young people working on their Masters degree in the visual arts, David Schoffman noted that the students in general, quoting Virginia Woolf, were “unhappy and rightly malignant.”
The dry, hot air of the auditorium held the faint odor of cabbage and not a few of the students lightly dozed during the forty-minute talk. The putative topic, as advertised in the department’s monthly brochure, was “The Delirium of William Blake,” but Schoffman, notorious for his impromptu digressions, wandered off into Dante’s depiction of Ulysses. “Considerate la vostra semenza,” Schoffman roared, stirring the somnolent and alarming the security guards who the week before had to quell a near riot after a bearded lecturer screamed something equally menacing in an equally foreign tongue.
Evoking Inferno’s 26th canto or any other canto for that matter among MFA students is typically seen as bad form. These newly minted artists do not want to be prodded into a messianic fervor by a middle-aged painter who still uses a palette knife. They want either densely packed hermetic aphorisms that include the word “conflate” or the word “disjunction” (or, preferably both), or they want practical marketing tips they can use the next time the dealers come marching through their cramped studios.
Speaking in Italian is also seen as bad form, as is French and Latin. Young artists today are linguistic nativists, preferring to communicate in the international language of mammon. Collectors, I was told rather bluntly by a professor of New Genre Studies at NYU, are uncomfortable around polymaths of any sort but are particularly put off by one with a ring in their nose. “By the time an art student reaches grad school, they are pretty well trained in keeping their erudition on the down low.”
So Schoffman, a man famously remote and inaccessible, was innocent of these niceties and stumbled, hat first, into a cauldron of cynicism. “Fatte non foste viver come bruti/ Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza,” he continued, completing the tercet. “Artists,” he went on, “remember your origins! It is not gain, but enlightenment that you are after!”
I’m not certain whether David actually managed to finish his sentence, but the pie seemed to come out of nowhere. A group calling itself “Nuevos Destructores de Imagen” claimed responsibility and later circulated a manifesto around campus entitled “Against The Color Blue.”
No comments:
Post a Comment