ULTIMATUM

My dear friend David Schoffman is considered by some to be an artist of only collateral significance. He is generally perceived to be a man capable of dazzling facility only to be hopelessly encumbered by the damp bog of third-rate, secondhand, stillborn ideas.

This assessment may be corrosive but it is well-deserved. His ecumenical approach to art and culture is simply unhygienic.

 He seems determined to alienate his peers and further anger his enemies. He is the anti-networker, the lonely gadfly, the elevator flatulator and the clamorous self-rightious contrarian. Unsurprisingly, his recently published Syllabus of Errors will earn him few new friends.  

A manifesto containing no less than 80 artistic offenses, this odd document appears to be rather catholic in its condemnations.

Take for example Error no. 56: 

Any reference, allusion, quotation or tangential association with popular culture damns a work to the purgatory of the fugitive, the temporal and the temporary. It is therefore unsustainable for serious works of art to engage in any dialectic which relies on faddish extra-artistic references. 

  If I'm reading this correctly this puts the full kabosh on the likes of artists like Giotto whose frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel were essentially the Tin Tin of the Trecento.

To be perfectly candid I've had it with Schoffman's bookish, brainy, highbrow hijinks. If he succeeds in alienating me he'll have nobody left and that would be error number 81.