GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT

I love my old Californian friend David Schoffman but he can be a real ninny sometimes.

In French you would call him un cancre. It's sort of hard to translate but the closest English equivalent would probably be "a dunce." 

The guy has skill and no shortage of intelligence but when it comes to what is known here as l'image de marque personnel ( I think you call it "the personal brand"), he's as hopeless as a cucumber, (désespérée comme un concombre).

He exhibits  paintings like this

 when he could just as easily make a respectable living and cultivate a reasonable reputation by peddling pictures like this:

But David is far too sophisticated to be tainted by sentimentality. These little watercolored baubles that he sketches so effortlessly lack the gravitas that he thinks his "real" paintings possess in abundance.

I have some bad, sobering news for my over-educated friend.

Nobody cares!!

This isn't turn-of-the-century Vienna. The literary café has been permanently rebuked by the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks. Opinion and argument, once valued as evidence of intellectual agility have been thoroughly displaced by the bland affirmations of "following," "poking" and "liking".

And speaking of poking in Vienna, the wittty Karl Kraus asserted many years ago that "art serves to rinse out our eyes." 

I'm not sure if he was being serious but in crackpot California the eyes of the educated are drowning in a golden shower of shite and if I were David I would wake up and smell the pee pee.

My suggestion is to crank out the watercolors with the dewy-eyed children and just throw in some ironic consequentialism and a few hypothetical syllogisms. Add some allusions to transgenderism and popular culture and everyone should be as happy as clowns.

In today's world, Kraus would be a marketing genius. 

He could have been talking about the art market ecosystem when he observed that ...

"Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots."