Lombardi's Web

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"People missed him not only as a friend, a member of the community, and an exciting artist," Richard says, "but also as what you might call a public intellectual, a watchdog, a commentator, and an explainer."

The difference between Lombardi and most other people is that most other people let these things go. They shake their heads after reading the business section and move on. Lombardi clearly couldn't. His drawings lucidly document the painful fallibility of late capitalism's banking and governmental structures and the international instability they caused -- ultimately leading to catastrophic events like September 11. Lombardi's work is a total debunking of the naive idea that governments and corporations are looking out for your best interest, a cold denial that the PR machines these institutions employ give the public any semblance of what happens behind the scenes, any semblance of the truth.

Lombardi's drawings are also impossibly delicate and gorgeously ethereal. Back away from a drawing too far and the crushing information disappears, dissolving into a fragile abstraction. As Richard says, "Standing before those drawings allows political thought to touch aesthetic thought, civilian-citizen thought to mingle with aesthetic-conceptual thought, organically, as they do in real life."

Nick Stillman writes about art, music, and politics and lives in New York City. Reprinted from Punk Planet. Subscriptions: $21.95 (6 issues) from 4229 N. Honore, Chicago, IL 60613; www.punkplanet.com

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