You don't have to be John Maynard Keynes to see that the People's Republic Inc. has traded the quaint quotations of Mao's Little Red Book for Gordan Gekkos Reaganite call to arms. And as my readers know all too well, there is no greater gauge of freshly coined arrivisme than an avidly superficial obsession with contemporary art.
Combine these two facts with my good friend's occult sense of opportunity and you get (pace John Adams)
Schoffman In China!
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| David Schoffman in a recent edition of the New Xinjiang Review |
He recently returned from a three week trip which took him from the far reaches of Shihezi in the northwest to the capital Beijing and finally to the pearl of the Pearl River, Guangzhou.
Officially he was there as an ambassador of sorts. appointed by Veronique Airys, the President's special liaison for international museum and library studies, to represent America at the annual Conference of Sense-Based Intelligence and Rhetoric in Hong Kong. (I kid you not, such a conference exists). In reality he was there pimping his declining career.
He delivered a paper harmlessly entitled "The Self-Cartographies of Performative and Spatial Praxis," and though in substance it was a boilerplate of starched, salvaged and reconditioned aperçus, it was met with heated, sectarian controversy. Apparently, David's Chinese hosts were none too thrilled by his tiring use of the phrase "post-Marxist" as a lazy euphemism for anything that occurred anywhere in the world after 1989.
Though they basically left him alone during the rest of his trip they did attach to him a small, discreet surveillance team.
[Note the arrows. The arrow on the upper left of the photograph points to a tiny camera fixed to the sign above a small souvenir shop. The other two arrows point to, what the Chinese lovingly call "undercover spotters."]
Tentative plans for an exhibition of David's work at Beijing's Bee Museum were summarily scraped.
Pity.
He had already begun work on some pretty decent paintings.
Though they basically left him alone during the rest of his trip they did attach to him a small, discreet surveillance team.
[Note the arrows. The arrow on the upper left of the photograph points to a tiny camera fixed to the sign above a small souvenir shop. The other two arrows point to, what the Chinese lovingly call "undercover spotters."]
Tentative plans for an exhibition of David's work at Beijing's Bee Museum were summarily scraped.
Pity.
He had already begun work on some pretty decent paintings.
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| Sleeping Buddha Sleeping, David Schoffman. Oil on Canvas, 2013 |
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