We recently connected with David Schoffman and have shared our conversation below.

David , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about one of the craziest things you’ve experienced in your journey so far.

“I have a five-inch blade and I could cut your throat in a heartbeat. Hand over your wallet and your book and you’ll live to talk about it.” The voice was soft, velvety, almost loving. The man sitting next to me on the Brooklyn bound D train was older than me, but not by much. He was dressed casually, was fairly clean cut and smelled vaguely of rose water and thyme. I had never been mugged before so the only protocol I was familiar with was the one I was shown on TV and the movies. I was supposed to hand over my stuff and try not to piss myself, but there was something in my assailant’s demeanor that hinted at his lack of commitment. “Why do you want my book?’, I asked, as if he had initiated a conversation rather than a felony. “Because I love poetry,” he whispered and I could tell from his tone that he was more than sincere.

I was seventeen years old when that happened. It was the first time in my life where I had met someone to whom literature was a mad, irrepressible passion. I didn’t give the guy my wallet but I did give him my dog eared copy of “A Season in Hell,” not because of the five-inch blade – I was fairly certain he was bluffing – but because I calculated that having spent exactly 45 cents plus tax on the book, there was no reason why I couldn’t replace it on my next trip to the Strand.

Looking back, I’m sure that it was then that the connection between art, danger, and audacious prevarication was planted into my consciousness.

David , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

In the early 1980’s I moved to Paris where I had hoped to experience the frisson of artistic transgression. I suppose I had read way too much Hemingway and Henry Miller and I was expecting John-Paul Sartre and E. M. Cioran to pick me up at the airport. Instead, what I found was a technocratic country governed by a coalition of Socialists and Communists determined to reshape society into a shangri-la for the working class. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m more left-wing than Lenin (or at least Lennon), but what I was looking for in France was a “derangement of the senses” and not necessarily a dry, daily rebuke of De Gaulle.

Back in those days, if you wanted to meet artists, you went to Tabac Saint-Suplice in the 18ème. It was there where I met Currado Malaspina, Sheila Bachelard, Dominic Pernod, Bogdan Dumitrica, Sammy Levi-Strauss, and the very old and very frail Faun Roberts. At the time my French was pretty rudimentary and let me tell you, those cats could talk. I had to work really hard to catch up, so I spent most of my mornings poring over Le Monde and La Nouvel Observateur with a small pocket dictionary, trying to acquire a respectable level of fluency. Let me tell you, those early years in Paris were critical to my development as a dissembling solipsist.

Malaspina and I hit it off immediately. He was an unlikely baseball fan even though he had never actually seen the game played. He used to work in his studio in the middle of the night listening to St Louis Cardinal games broadcast on Radio Free Europe. He said that it was the closest he ever got towards a fully realized surrealist experience. When I explained the “designated hitter rule” to him his heart sank.

Anyway, together with Currado, I started playing with the idea of an Artist’s Collective as a way of circumventing the conventional ecology of aesthetic meritocracy. We had trouble recruiting members so we started making up names and elaborate biographies to go with those names. Now, almost 50 years later, PDP™ has grown into an international ruse with branches on every continent except Antarctica.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

A non-fungible token suggests that somewhere in the universe, there’s a place for fully fungible tokens. The purpose of The Plausible Deniability Project™ – if we consent to employing the much overused but stubbornly ephemeral term ‘purpose’ – is to recognize a vacuum and to fill that vacuum before anyone else has a chance to. So while we fully concede that PDP™’s FT’s are superfluous, their place in the general artistic landscape is absolutely essential.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Let me tell you about the time when, while living in San Francisco, I was so desperate for ideas that I started watching daytime TV. Now, I’m sure your readers know that working a nine-to-five job is a spirit crushing cesspool of desensitizing compromise and incessant intellectual futility. And yet, compared to daytime TV, regular employment is like skydiving over the Andes while tripping on mushrooms.

But I was desperate. I was about 35 years-old and I felt that my greatest sins were behind me. I was an empty shell. I was reduced to painting plein-air landscapes on birch panels and selling them at craft fairs. I mean, here I was, the founder of The Plausible Deniability Project™, the most radical, avant-garde artist collective on the planet and all I could come up with were homages to Corot. I was deflated. I was dejected. My self-esteem was in the toilet. And then one day, while watching the Jerry Springer Show, I had this transcendental epiphany. I realized that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how diligent I was, no matter how clever I could be, no matter how profound I was, at the end of the day, nobody could care less.

That was mind-blowing. Up until that moment I deluded myself into thinking that everything I valued had consequence. I naïvely believed that books, operas, paintings, philosophical treatises, political manifestos, cinema, poetry, exegetical hair-splitting, and artistic integrity were important, It’s so funny to think back on that time and how, in my callow middle-age, I still believed in culture.

Fortunately, I was raised with the thick hide of a peasant. I bounced back and returned to my former prodigious self. If that’s not a legend in resilience, I don’t know what is.

Contact Info:

• Website: davidschoffman.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/plausibledeniabilityproject/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PlausibleDeniabilityProject
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/currado-malaspina-b04a77109/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimmyBl48988325
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUghUcWCmADLLVVL2XPHb3w
• Other: (BLOG) https://davidschoffman.blogspot.com (PODCAST) https://open.spotify.com/show/3PT2zFA44Swivs130ISLMD