A WOMAN SCORNED

After decades of unambiguous unanimity, a fissure, a fracture and an irreconcilable set of bitterly contentious differences has destabilized the academic and critical communities beyond recognition. A new generation of scholars and specialists seem hell bent on reversing years and years of rock-ribbed canonical orthodoxy. Heading the charge is none other than Dahlia Danton whose recent reinvention as an independent critic and curator has left more than a few of her colleagues deeply skeptical if not outright suspicious.

Dahlia Danton in David Schoffman's Culver City studio. 2013

Like many a bolshevik before her, the first privileged targets of her merciless and wrathful revisions have been her closest friends. With hyphenated hyperbole she has called Ximena Lukacs an "anti-philosophical floosie," Moïse St. Pierre a "flat-footed, ham-fisted aesthetic technocrat" and her former protégé Spark Boon an "out-dated and out-numbered dabbler in antique bric-a-brac."

She saved her most venomous and malignant prose for my dear compagnon de route, David Schoffman. Comparing him to Ingres (whom she glibly described as "tight-assed), Danton contends that David dwells in an hermetic bubble where making art masquerades as a noble and ethical enterprise. She challenges what she calls "the metaphysical ballast that constrains his work within an artificial architecture of tact and reason."

She sites his grand project The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings as evidence for what she describes as "the loathsome onanistic artisanship where quality and depth act as embarrassing exercises in pitiable nostalgia." 

from The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings, no.76, 2013, David Schoffman

Danton famously wrote in a 2011 essay in the online journal Art(test) that "errors of regression under the shroud of formal significance are detached but never exempt from modernity." She seems to believe that by separating herself from her former colleagues she can successfully allude, in her own ouevre, the "shroud" of obsolescence.

I just think she's still mad at Schoffman because of his indiscreet dalliance with Orestia Shestov.