Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, apolitical operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a meta physician if not a scientist.Buoyed by his spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow-banking industry to record-breaking heights from a decades-old alliance between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, Mark Lombardi may be unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber-security is only now coming to light.