POST # 176: THEATER OF THE CORRUPT

Before my accident I completed my latest (last?) 12’ triptych, the fourth in the series. I guess I’m fortunate not to be a commercial success; it makes it easy for me to move on and explore new ideas. Every week I scan the art sections in the New York Times in the vain hope that social satire will come back in style. I think the last time there was anything like what I do was during the Great Depression. There’s a lot of social “commentary” in the art world today, but it primarily deals with gender or racial issues. Artists – and the galleries, the museums and the collectors – are understandably reluctant to bite the plutocratic hand that feeds them!

My attic contains a slew of giant Trump-like characters that I created a couple of decades ago out of 8’ sheets of industrial cardboard. Now, all I have to do is add a blond comb-over to the main man and I’ve got “The Donald” down cold. I also portray his entourage: the bimbos, the goons, the corrupt moneymen and politicians, the lawyers, the accountants and the bankers who make him possible. Oddly enough, I had never heard of “Trump the Developer” at the time I created this series, but I had met enough like him in my civic work as a preservation consultant to create a “Theater of the Corrupt” without being specific. Using an Exacto knife, I cut out close to two-dozen, six-foot cardboard figures that could be carried around the stage (Brecht-like) or placed on wooden stands in a gallery – using lighting to create giant shadows. I’d encountered dozens of these characters while trying to save beautiful old buildings from demolition. While expensively dressed and bejeweled, with phony airs of culture and gentility (several were actually noted art collectors), I soon discovered that when you got the trappings off, they were just thugs. They came from different ethnic, educational and economic backgrounds, but they had one thing in common: interfere with their profits in any way and they would slit your throat. I never found a place willing to exhibit the figures (no surprise) and I don’t even know where to look. No gallery owner or museum director in his right mind would want to bite the hand that feeds him. It’s okay for the art world to protest the mistreatment of transgenders and minorities and women (all worthy causes) but don’t affect their bottom line by making fun of customers.

A few years afterward, I created a follow-up series: this time cutout paper dolls (male, X-rated, therefore never exhibited as well). I stripped my Real Estate Moguls of their Manafort-style clothing and covered their middles with removable towels. You’re better off not knowing what’s underneath.

Renee Kahn