By: Adam Kluger

In his dreams, Bugowski was making love passionately to a mysterious pale skinned woman with black hair, orange eyes and soft pink lips. When he awoke on the tattered couch he felt a pleasant caress on his face that he thought was left-over pixie dust from his erotic imaginings. In fact, it was a rather large cockroach or perhaps water bug that he quickly swatted off his head only to watch it quickly disappear into the couch. Yeeeuucch!

At the coffee-shop later on with Art-World Outlier Manfred Gogol, the current desperate state of affairs was quickly dispensed with in favor of more interesting topics, like a recent article about the price fixing sham that was the fine art-world.

“Yeah I read that article, my reaction?, replied Gogol holding court as always like an angry bull in a tea shoppe, ” yeah… no shit, Sherlocks.”

Bugowski smiled, glad to have gotten a rise out of his animated comrade, who never woke before noon, as he suspected a good piece of performance art might soon be in the offing for the unsuspecting patrons at the high-priced, over-caffeinated way-station for the unemployed.”

“So Gogol you agree, it’s all a giant scam?”

“Whoa…Nelly! Easy there- Nobody is saying that… I do agree with the basic premise of the article that there is a club and either you are in or you’re out!”

“Like project runway huh? One day you’re in the next day you’re out!”

“Not quite.”

“So what are you saying?” Bugowski sensed that Gogol was just about ready to go off.

“What I’m saying and what everybody here in this coffee shop should know if they don’t know it already is that I am the greatest living photographer in the world and I still don’t have a gallery or a show lined up for the fall and that’s a crime far worse than what is being perpetrating on the American public in the White House or by Hollywood.”

A few heads at tables nearby turned to watch Manfred as he now segued into a dead-on impersonation of Donald Trump talking about his good friends in Russia and “Gyna” and how “we are gonna win so much we are gonna get tired of winning.”

Gogol wasn’t only a great artist he was one of the best impressionists around. You just had to wind him up a little.

“So what you’re saying President Trump is that there is nothing to worry about in terms of the state of the art world?”

“It’s Fake News…Fake News by CNN…and there are some really terrific artists out there–my friend Omarosa knows some very interesting black artists–artists of black descent–who have escaped the hell that is Detroit and the ghettos there to make very important art that will soon be featured in one of my Trump hotels in Mumbai–so you know this art has got to be the very best art that ever was.”