Overview
In this crime noir, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission from an odd source, the very man who brought him down, a former football referee turned art handler — to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art. Perlat Tile, Pablo Pablon, Ms. Jasmine, Naj, Dr. Enver Harmoni, and the rest of the characters are sketched definitively, but with an eye on their ambiguous, unknowable depths—the darkness of which only emerges once in a rare while. Tersely delivered, with a dry sense of the ridiculous, the book calmly regards the commodification of aesthetics and their subsequent price-tags as a necessary evil, a machine under which the bodies of his protagonists are rolled.Reviews
"I am impressed with Art, Mystery. Cracking dialogue. I enjoyed reading it. I also thought it was very funny and wore its humour integrally. I mean, like, subtle." —Josephine Pryde
"With a ratio heavily favoring the amount of cultural scaffolding erected to the number of footbridges burned, Mr. Mayo, a self-styled refusalist, has stood slyly in the margins of multiple worlds for decades." —Keith Connelly, BOMB
"Since 1967, Texan guitarist Mayo Thompson has been pulverising the art and language of rock." —David Keenan, The WireAuthor Biography
Mayo Thompson is the co-founder of the formative avant-garde, psychedelic rock collaborative Red Krayola and has collaborated with conceptual art collective Art & Language and Albert Oehlen. He lives in Los Angeles, California.