INTERLOCK

Shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York City, the immensely ambitious conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide.

The fame he’d so relentlessly sought was at last within his reach – museums were lining up to buy his work – so speculation about whether his death was a suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since.

Lombardi’s March 2000 show unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of then Presidential candidate George W. Bush and the evolution of the shadow-banking industry to record-breaking heights from a decades-old alliance between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime.

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, Interlock is the first comprehensive biography of this contradictory and original artist, a man who was an enigma and whose influence in the art world—and the world of computer science and cyber-security—is just now coming to light.

Patricia Goldstone has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and has written for the Washington Post, Maclean’s, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, among others. She is the author of Making the World Safe for Tourism (Yale University Press 2001) and is an award-winning playwright.