ART AND POLITICS

The Austerlitz mural project has been a daunting task. Ever since my dear friend Currado Malaspina accepted the commission it has been one misadventure after another.

Designed as a massive 30 foot wide variation on his famous Palimpseste series, Currado has employed a small army of young assistants to complete the picture on time.

The problem is that his heart is simply not in it. He no longer craves the respect and recognition he once did as a younger man. He is also relatively well-off, considering that a typical work fetches somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy-five thousand euro.

He seems to be just going through the motions and he's consigning more and more of the creative work to his most trusted aids.

As a result the quality of the draftsmanship has markedly suffered but as Malaspina rightly points out, this was also the case with Rubens.

I suppose what is most disappointing is that the City of Paris is equally ambivalent. Commissioning Currado in the first place began as just a political payoff, an act of craven, insider cronyism where some lower-level bureaucrat did some creative accounting in order to placate a government minister who happens to share a mistress with Malaspina. The result is that nobody is happy and for the foreseeable future there will be a large blemish of a picture greeting the innocent commuters of a perfectly adequate though over-lit Metro station.   

DAHLIA DANTON

The French have a nasty, petty way about them. There's a stain upon their collective character that can be summed up in the following famous unattributed aphorism:

  

Il n'y a pas une grande vertu d'être laid. 

And while my dear friend Currado Malaspina is quick to add that while there is no great virtue in being ugly there is equally no great shame in being gorgeous.

Dahlia Danton with Currado Malaspina (date unknown)

 "Je suis un esthète, he declares at every opportunity as if by claiming to be an aesthete he reserves for himself the right to treat people like Ming Dynasty earthenware or rosewood Shaker chairs. "I love to surround myself with things of beauty."

To regard people as ornaments or mere objects for the delectation of the senses is seen in the United States as something uniquely anti-social. No so in France my friend Currado insists. To use human beings in order to inspire and add refinement to one's life and to advance one's personal artistic enterprise has, to me at least, a uniquely feudal feel. But this is precisely how Malaspina operates.

And as such he insists on surrounding himself with beautiful women. 

It is highly questionable whether he is capable of treating any of these women as equals.

There is however one notable exception.

Dahlia Danton

And she knows it!

THE DIGNITY OF AGING

Freud correctly observed that man's imagination fails while trying to imagine death. My good friend Currado Malaspina reached a similar conclusion after recently undergoing a medical procedure to remove a benign skin lesion below his left ear.

Lesion of Honor, watercolor on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

A fleeting glimpse of oblivion can result in several outcomes. Slapped with the realization of inevitable decay can be a deeply humbling experience. A realignment of values in favor of the ethical, a tilt toward selflessness and gratitude is a typical reaction under these circumstances.

This, of course, was not Malaspina's response at all. For Currado an epistemological approach toward rectitude is a non-starter. He wears his reputation as a trou-du-cul with great pride. His brief brush with mortality only amplified his narcissism.

"The brilliant flame of dissipation"  (la flamme brillante de inconduite) is how he puts it, a life illuminated by sin. Nothing animates Malaspina more than the wretched glow of excess. Now that he has received his clean bill of health he is determined more than ever to satisfy his Caligula-like appetites in full.

"I am a monster," he told me the other day on the phone. 

Yes, Currado but how's your prostate?
  

TAEDIUM VITAE

The illusion of election is not something unique to artists - most religions contain a clause to that effect - but my good friend Currado Malaspina has taken this fantasy to an alpine extreme. His business card for example is a glossy self-portrait with the caption "Currado Malaspina: présenter une demande à Google."

That such a search would likely yield about two dozen pages of results should not in any way elevate the Internet into some sort of arbiter of high-cultural currency. Think for example of searching the name Lorena Bobbitt or the phrase "recipes with frozen vegetables" and you will see my point. 

Malaspina 2005

His work, though far from uninteresting, ranks well below that of his much younger contemporaries. On any given day, a leisurely stroll through the galleries of Williamsburg, Beleville or Brunnenstrasse would quickly disabuse any baby-booming nostalgic of the antique perception of Currado Malaspina as a cutting-edge or 'cool' artist.

Curators continue to insist upon his relevance but that has more to do with the average age of the museum trustee (62) than with the enduring nature of Malaspina's minor triumphs. 

Malaspina's arrogance, to be fair, is simply a mechanism for his spiritual survival for how else does one justify a life of abject selfishness. How to explain the four wives, the countless mistresses, the neglected children and the infinite injury imposed upon friend and foe alike? 

 I pity the poor guy because I'm sure that in his heart of hearts he knows his life has been one long bagatelle of imperiousness and boredom.

Maybe with his last remaining years he could divert his ennui into something more benign.

Like getting a pet.