On the face of it, it looks like my dear friend Currado Malaspina is retiring from the art world.
These days he spends most of his time taking long walks through his native Paris, admiring the architecture and nibbling on lightly buttered ficelles that he prepares in advance and packs in neatly folded rectangles of wax paper.
Occasionally he steps into a church and sits in a pew to rest. Sometimes he is almost calmed by the solemnity of the place. He finds the dim lights and the redolence of incense and mold strangely erotic. Sometimes he is moved toward the precipice of awe.
Not an ecclesiastical awe, though I wouldn't rule that possibility out entirely, but by a reverential recognition of what Guy Debord might have characterized as the 'spectacle.' By this I mean that Currado respects sanctity only as an historical remnant and it is precisely in the successful commodification of religion where he reserves his admiration. To him prayer is the ultimate form of artistic conceit.
It's at that exquisitely lucid moment of cynicism where Currado takes out his small brown carnet de croquis and makes a quick, clumsy pencil sketch, marking the time and date on the back.
Like many contemporary intellectuals who draw comfortable salaries from academia, journalism or politics, Malaspina has lost his faith in institutions. Artists are typically slow in accepting the fact that their participation in what is clumsily referred to as 'the discourse' is redundant. People no longer have time for ideas and even less time for those who interpret ideas. The bitter truth is that the insular community of self-anointed custodians of high culture are considered by most reasonable people as an adolescent bunch of lazy cranks.
Gone are the days where brilliantly encrypted paintings left the public ruminating on the mysteries of genius.
Currado is tired. He tells me that people never realized how difficult it was for him to sustain the myth that shrouded him like a cassock. Life is simpler now. Long walks and harmless sketches done on the fly are now his greatest pleasures.
Perhaps it's old age and the simple wisdom that accompanies one's recognition of mortality.
Or maybe he's just out of ideas.
