Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar - Filthy Fluno

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CERTAINLY, FILTHY FLUNO is not the first artist to realize that in order to sell his paintings, he needs to sell himself. He does, however, work at it with impressive zeal. Every day he makes new friends and cultivates new contacts, edging himself and his work — a collection of expressionistic oil paintings and vibrant, graffiti-laced pastels — just a little bit farther into a universe that to others might appear huge and indifferent, but as Filthy sees it is stuffed with possibility and also potential customers. To this end, you will often find him wandering around art openings and dance parties, dressed in a spiffy suit and pair of sneakers, trying earnestly to chat up every person in the room.

Filthy happens to hang around with a lot of buxom women and men with chiseled jaws, people possessing a kind of Barbie-and-Ken flawlessness. Among them, he is a curious standout, a short black guy with a bulging midsection and an oversize Afro that waves tantalizingly as he speaks. He has a couple of sharp-looking snaggleteeth that poke out of the left side of his mouth, adding to his misfit charm. Even when he is dancing his signature dance — something called the Wet Kitty, a half-comic pantomime in which he hops from one leg to the other while boosting his palms toward the ceiling — he never stops communicating, never for a minute stops angling to make an art sale.

One time a few months ago, I accompanied Filthy to an outdoor dance club and watched as he did the Wet Kitty and simultaneously carried on a long, thoughtful conversation about art and poetry with a woman who, the entire time, was engaged in a gropingly erotic, lip-to-lip slow dance with another man — a tall, flowing-haired Fabio-type, who was shirtless and altogether impervious to Filthy’s presence. As the discussion continued, as a breeze blew and Fabio’s hands wantonly roved, as the music pulsed and the dance-floor lights blinked different colors, the woman shared with Filthy a sentimental poem she’d written called “Falling,” but still, she never once broke her gaze with the other guy. Filthy was undeterred. His world is full of such simultaneities. It is, he feels, just a slightly more in-your-face version of multitasking, akin to the way the rest of us may surreptitiously check e-mail while on the phone. In any event, it does not interfere with his optimism. “She seemed a little busy,” he conceded, leaving the club. “But there was potential there. She really could be my next customer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08fluno-t.html?th&emc=th