The mystery of Tran Duc Van

Last week MAN reader Aaron Moulton sent in a note about Tran Duc Van, the GawkerForum diarist we spotlighted here. "Tran Duc Van," Moulton said, seems to be a pseudonym.

A Google search on "Tran Duc Van" supported Moulton's theory. TDV has a virtually invisible art-related Google-print. So then who could it be? All signs -- and several art world luminaries who were willing to chat about TDV on the down-low -- point toward Jack Bankowsky, the former Artforum editor who has a distant relationship with ethical propriety.

(I asked Artforum.com managing editor Brian Sholis if TDV was a pseudonym -- and if it was Jack Bankowsky. He declined to answer either question. Moulton jokingly suggested we also check with Jeff Wall, who titled this photograph, the third one down, Tran Duc Van. Bankowsky wrote about Wall for Artforum in 2003.)

Could it be that Artforum, repeatedly cited for its lax ethics, was presenting its particular kind of 'reportage' under a phony name? I mean, why be straightforward or honest with your readers? Why not let writers hide their agendas under pseudonyms?

Perhaps Bankowsky created a fake name in an effort to hide the kinds of conflicts-of-interest against which we have railed. Perhaps that 'frees him' to write last month's post, in which he plugs David Weiss, "éminence grise of the Swiss art world" -- and an artist represented by Bankowsky boyfriend Matthew Marks. "Tran Duc Van" went on to dwell on Fischli & Weiss:

I have not given Dean's work the attention it deserves, but after half an hour of Weiss's suggestive commentary I vowed to use this Basel visit as an occasion to take the overdue plunge. Weiss, to give you the flavor, says things like: "It is very, very difficult to make art that has no irony." Then he pauses and adds: "It may also be very stupid." He was not, by then, speaking of Dean. As it happened, he was worrying, like an old-fashioned Greenbergian, about the perils of kitsch. Of course, F & W's work is not old fashioned, and, indeed, for an artist for whom the tourist snapshot constitutes creative ground zero, his concern constitutes a refinement worth thinking about.

"Fun" is a favorite word in the F & W lexicon, and they use the term with post-Warholian promiscuousness—which implies, of course, that requisite irony. Fischli, speaking of fun, had just then returned to our table with Beatrix Ruf, of the Kunsthalle Basel, and Mendes Bürgi of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Conscious they had been gone for while, Fischli feigned a "just-had-a-joint" dopiness. Are we having fun yet?

Then, before TDV could steer clear of Marks connections, he gets in a plug for another Marks artist, Andreas Gursky.

Back in December, TDV GawkerForumed about some peripheral Art Basel Miami Beach festivities. He included air-kisses to a bunch of collectors, including Aaron Fleischman and Lin Lougheed: "Casa Fleischman manages to be everything that Miami should be but rarely is." I wonder if they're Marks clients. Who knows? When you're hiding behind fake names who knows anything?