Saturday, June 21, 2014

CONFUCIANISM CONFUSED


When my good friend David Schoffman told me he was retiring his paintbrushes and moving to Silicon Valley I thought he was kidding. When he explained why, I knew he had lost his mind.


"The alleged ugliness of office parks is a 20th century bias rooted in the discredited aspirations of Romanticism."

That's how he explained it to me. He describes the architecture and the landscaping as "man's ultimate repudiation of the anarchy of nature." He insists that Silicon Valley is the perfect environment to put the final kabash on the European tradition.

"Painting and all other forms of static representation are now the derelict remains of a failed utopian vision. Beauty and the sublime are frivolous self-indulgent luxuries of a bygone era and an artist must respond with vigor and alacrity."

The Body Is His Book #67, David Schoffman, oil on panel

This from the man who has spent the past fifteen years working on The Body Is His Book, the 0ne-hundred paneled polyptych.

It was only through a third-party that I found out that the real reason David moved was that he sold some sort of food/mapping/chat app to Zorintech for an undisclosed and presumably obscene pile of cold cash.


I hear he's going to China soon.

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