Friday, May 23, 2008

Les Ficelles Silencieuses de Dessins



Something is most assuredly amiss.

For twenty-two years I have greeted each new day with a pain au chocolate, hot milk and the early edition of Le Vers L’Avant, the Midi’s finest newspaper. I rely on its inky pages for a mature, dispassionate rendering of the world’s events. Free of idle speculation, puerile gossip, tendentiousness and hype, L’Avant is an artful relic of a non-existent past.

I was therefore irritably confounded when today’s Art and Culture section led with the following headline: “The Sorcery Of Chalk: David Schoffman Stuns California Crowd With The Silent Strings Of Drawing.”

What a half-lunged, nimble-tongued burlesque! Empty of analysis, vacant of scrutiny, Schoffman could not have received better press had he paid for it! Sending a journalist to DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica to cover the farcical “Live Draw” was bad enough. The toadying servility of the reporting, comparing Schoffman to the likes of Dominique Pécuchet and Veronique Bouvard, two of the Republic’s finest living artists, was a rancid exercise in American style public relations.

I have cancelled my subscription.

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