THE NEW (OTHER) GULF

The grim business of setting up appointments, meeting curators and collectors, answering queries from curious graduate students and granting interviews to journalists who would be more at home writing for the Food Section of their local tabloid is the part of the art business that my good friend Currado Malaspina loves best.

Dahlia Danton at the Doha Women's Conference, 2013

Unlike his much younger colleague and former maîtresse primaire Dahlia Danton, Currado does not approach the task with any resentment or reluctance. Quite the contrary, Malaspina moves effortlessly from the quaint ignorance of the rich to the craven sycophancy of the critics to the earnest entreaties of aspiring young acolytes looking to advance their careers by simple propinquity. 

It's all the same to Currado. It's attention and he's addicted to it like a dog is to dirt.

And so when Abduhalikh Göktürks, Royal Sharid of Aqaba commissioned Currado for an unofficial court portrait he was tickled by the opportunity. 

Portrait of Abduhalikh, oil on canvas, Malaspina, 2013

As is well known, Aqaba's growing community of art collectors has shaken up the market beyond recognition. The recent opening of The Sovereign Jordanian Museum of Contemporary Art has signaled nothing less than a sea change in the dynamics of Middle Eastern patronage.

With the opening of a satellite campus of Somerset Lucknow University just outside the town of Kanafeh (which offers programs in Computer Science, Accounting and the Fine Arts), the area is quickly assuming a hipster desert caché. Currado, always alert to unusual opportunities is happy to be one of the first on board. And while most would balk, seeing only political instability and unsettling flux, Currado see's it raining dinars, dirhams and qirsh.

He's even learning how to snorkel! 

THE MOVEMENT TO TRADEMARK THE WORD "FRENCH"

Self-congratulation is a universal vice but no one exceeds the Americans in their inflated sense of self.

So claims my good friend Currado Malaspina, a man known for his blunt candor and blanket generalizations. He was visiting the U.S. recently, taking part in a three-day conference called "Clarion Toward the Future." Held on the campus of Jack Feld Christian College in Savannah, Georgia, this broad-brushed symposium of writers, athletes, artists and mental health executives presented panels and forums where leaders in their fields could expostulate on the present and prognosticate on the future.

There is no atmosphere so electric as one where pessimism and hope mingle like dinner guests desperate for a ride home. Insights and ideas circulated like second-hand smoke as the conferees hopscotched from meeting to meeting to redundant meeting.

Currado presented a sound and light Powerpoint presentation on the recurring theme of the Madonna in western culture. From Duccio di Buonisegna to Lady Gaga, Malaspina breathlessly touched on a myriad of unrelated themes and stunned the assembled crowd with an off-key rendering of Material Girl while accompanying himself on a toy accordion.

Strangely enough, the strongest impression he received revolved around diet and nutrition. "Americans," he told me, "love their food dripping in oil. They spend lavishly on sneakers, golf clubs and mobile phones yet skimp on something so simple as oil. They incessantly fry most of their under-seasoned, over-cooked foods in something vaguely resembling huile moteur. They have even audaciously renamed les frites as if to flippantly absolve themselves of their heedless, criminal, culinary irresponsibility."

And Currado ... what about your own melodic malfeasance!??