ART IS HELL

To remint a hackneyed cliché, sometimes truth is more frivolous than fiction. My dear Los Angeles comrade David Schoffman seems to have single-handedly resurrected early modernism's infatuation with criminality.

Not since the days of Jean Genet and John-Paul Sartre has the frisson of transgression been so acute.

It seems that David has been combing the underworld, employing the skills of con men the way his colleagues exploit the eager ambitions of unpaid interns.

Somehow Schoffman got his hands on one of three extant copies of Nel Mondo Gramo, the famous 18th century progenitor of today's graphic novel. This eccentric visual rendering of Dante's Inferno has been erratically circulating through the antiquarian world for years. 

David claims his to be the finest and cleanest one.

But it doesn't stop there!

With the lucky panache of a true post-modernist, Schoffman "hired" a well known check-floating passport forger to reproduce, page for page, this precious document.

To make matters even more hilarious, he has exhibited his counterfeit manuscript under the dubious cover of Dadaist pranksterism.

I envy the American art world! Over in the States, literally anything goes ...