IN EXCHANGE FOR WORDS

The tragedy of Currado Malaspina is too petty, too puerile, too insignificant to serve as a cautionary tale. Malaspina is a silly, gifted man. His reputation in France has never suffered from his serial scandals. Quite the contrary. But to American sensibilities, his chest-thumping maleness is a putrid remnant of a discredited time.

 

Perhaps this graphic record will suffice.

WATER(COLOR) UNDER THE BRIDGE

My dear colleague, the French artist Currado Malaspina, is not the most tactful person I know. We met years ago at a conference in Lyon that had something to do with contemporary European painting and he made a deep impression upon me.

He was no more likable then, then he is now.

At the time he had just inherited the directorship of this oddball, neo-Dada artist collective called The Plausible Deniability Project™ (PDP™). He heart wasn't in it. He passed most of the leadership responsibilities to the California painter Dahlia Danton, an artist of modest ability known mostly for her conspicuous indifference to irony. Benefiting from the prestige the republic of France inexplicably grants to loud men in positions of authority, Malaspina turned PDP™ into a lightening rod for Twitter-ready controversy.

His luck may have run out.

"Malaspina est annulé," is the latest headline in the Parisian art press. It seems that some were triggered by his latest show at Valéry Contemporain. 

I'm curious. Perhaps there's more to the story than these trifling little watercolors.