INNOCENT FRAUD

When I asked my good friend Currado Malaspina how his kid sister Beatrice was doing his eyes began to swell like a sponge.

"I've gone from bad to worse to total resignation and all I ever think about is the tragic loss of lovely promise."

I'm not accustomed to Currado being so sincere and emotional but the subject of his sister had hit a nerve.

Currado was 14 when his father Sordello disappeared for good. His mother was what we would call today an ICD-10 294.11 but in those days was referred to simply as "batshit crazy" (fou comme le merde d'une chauve souris). Together with hustling tourists for chump change, learning to draw and seducing immigrant shop-girls at le Printemps, Currado spent his adolescence raising his younger sister under a stern, over-protective umbrella.

"I imagine her now as this beautiful, angelic and brilliant woman, prone, face down in a pile of  debris and all I can think of is that someone is throwing away a perfectly good human."

"A crumpled, trampled 100 euro bill can still buy some wine and paté but once you rip it in half, it becomes worthless. That's my sister - a soul  seized by good people with bad ideas. 

"It's sometimes known as 'la corruption de bonnes intentions' (noble cause corruption), when people with the most forthright motives do unconscionable things."

I have to confess that I had no idea what the heck Malaspina was talking about. Then, a few days later I ran into Beatrice by the canal de l'Ourcq. She smelled like a punchbowl of patchouli and printing ink and was handing out flyers announcing a soirée spéciale at some office complex in the 19th.

Beatrice had apparently become an itinerant pitchwoman for Point de Repère©, the recently rehabilitated pop-psyche ponzi patter-fest that has transformed perfectly maladjusted bohemians into minor corporate shills.

They mean well ... they really do.

Life is brutal and if your mother was mad and your dad was a cad and your brother was the country's most famous and most puerile artist/pornographer you too would need a psychological amphetamine.

So Beatrice drank the pastis (i.e. Kool-Aid). 

Through a fixed and freaky stare she asks passersby if they are ready to "créer la possibilité pour une percée incroyable" and then proceeds to press a glossy prospectus into their unreceptive palm.

Yes ... she's that woman!

But please, if you see her, don't hasten your step or cross to the other side of the street. All she's doing is looking for love. 

Have compassion.

Even glassy-eyed evangelists deserve our pity.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Now on the seeping, leaching bleeding edge of art marketing technology comes a brand new and exciting venture - the step-brainchild of my good, ambitious friend Currado Malaspina.

Imagine this: You walk into your favorite coffee shop and innocently order a low-fat (dry) iced cappuccino and a quinoa-cranberry scone. You swipe your phone across the sensor and while nine dollars and forty-five cents are immediately charged to your caffeine-credit rewards card some invisible algorithmic alchemists have entered your purchase into their vast and comprehensive database. So while you think you’ve just bought a snack for the price of a pair of guppies what has actually happened is that Starbucks just sold some of your personal consumer history to Pepsico who are relieved to learn that though you’re still overweight you’re not quite yet diabetic.

Lovely, right? So why hasn’t the artworld figured out how to monetize your privacy as well?

The answer is … it has!!

Or at least Currado has and he has patents in sixteen countries to prove it!

Taches EURL is a matrix driven silo structured, limited partnership, offshore company that is tasked with providing top-flight viewer-friendly museum and gallery experiences to the moderately affiliated cultural tourist and prospective mid-scale, hobbyhorse collector.

OK … I didn’t exactly write that - I cribbed it from Currado’s new website (and translated it myself into a tamer, friendlier siliconish prose).  But to be fair and honest, his idea is as brilliant as it is diabolical. He basically offers a free smartphone and Android app that’s designed to give short, coherent commentary when a user visits a museum, gallery or art fair. Essentially it tracks which works of art the user looks at and measures the duration of each interaction. By these metrics Taches is able to compile a fairly reliable profile of the user’s taste in art.

For example, a person goes to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and briskly waltzes past the Kandinskys and the Mondrians but lingers over the Bonnards. Then, while visiting an exhibition devoted to the the drawings of James Ensor bypasses a retrospective of paper bag drawings of Micah Carpentier. A profile is created on the user based on the amount of time spent in front of each piece thus reliably assessing both affinity and aversion. This information is then sold to art dealers who can refine their targeted marketing based of the confirmed tastes of the consumer!

The idea is to use the gentle surveillance of smartphone tracking in order to reach potential consumers of not only original works of art but also what are now called in the industry “art accessory inventories.” These include books, posters, greeting cards, ties, t-shirts, broaches, kerchiefs and toys. 

Even pet stores can use it to identify the fans of Jeff Koons. 

The user experience is about to get friendlier - so long as you consider the constant sticking of one's intrusive, unsolicited nose into your business a fair measure of genuine friendliness.