Corzine Agonistes, Volume 2

The world buzzes in anticipation...

Mogulite weighs in with:

Jon Corzine’s career is about to be memorialized — in the worst way possible.

Geoffrey Raymond, an artist famous for painting portraits of disgraced Wall Street execs (which have fetched thousands of dollars), has set his sights on Corzine, according to Reuters. And it’s not good company for him to be in: Raymond’s past subjects include Lehman’s Dick Fuld and Bear Stearns’ Jimmy Cayne.

In a weird way, Raymond’s decision to paint Corzine feels like a sort of induction into the Wall Street bad boys club. Sure, the court of public opinion — or, you know, an actual court — might be a more official indoctrination into this unrarified air. But Raymond’s paintings have a rather visceral public-gets-back-at-exec ritual that any Wall Street guru would want to avoid.

Reuters explains that, following completion, Raymond hikes down to “the scene of the crime” with his paintings (“the Bear Stearns building with his Jimmy Cayne portrait or the Lehman Brothers headquarters with his Richard Fuld painting”) and allows anyone and everyone to write messages on them. There are, unfortunately for the subject of the portraiture, some predictable results.

So where will Raymond take his Corzine art? “Likely… to a local bar in Lower Manhattan.” Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

I'm weighing in with this, more or less:



And, since I doubt any of you read the comments, a reader weighs in with this:

"So, what does this Raymond guy actually do?"

"Well, he often takes other people's photographs then does works based on them."

"Ah, right, just like that guy who got sued for his Obama "hope" image that was based on someone else's photo? I heard Koons does similar things to Raymond, using other people's photos as the basis for works."

"Yeah. Funny you should say that, since Koons was successfully sued in the early '90s for using someone's photo as the basis for his String of Puppies work."

"Fascinating stuff. Guess that Raymond guy better watch out.

Which is pretty interesting, not only for the legal argument (about which I've expended a fair amount of thought) but for the Commenter's doff of the hat to TYOMP's internal dialogue/Greek Chorus sections.