The ultra-stylised poses of Gilbert and George are those of self-con scious decadents, infinitely refined aesthetes, just like the image created by Roxy Music or David Bowie.
They know they're a self-deceiving con.
It exposes the doctrine for what it is: a gigantic self-serving con.
HE'S a dapper man, a ladies man, a self-described con man with a heart of gold.
And Asahara Shoko, the guru of Aum Shinrikyo, was a very talented religious teacher and a very gifted teacher of yoga, as well as a self-promoting con man.
Vincent is a voyeur, a self-professed con artist with "a serial killer's people skills" and "a Schopenhauerian outlook on life," as she wrote in "Self-Made Man".
He also recalls the Wright depicted by Brendan Gill in his 1987 biography, "Many Masks": a brilliant artist who also happened to be a lying, self-promoting con man fond of emotional brinkmanship — except that Mr. Boyle's fictionalized architect possesses none of that man's charm or genius.
Eventually, his thirst for thrills and lucre led to a job promoting and selling paintings for Mr. Kostabi, the artist and self-proclaimed con man who made his name by mass-producing canvases conceived and executed by a team of painters.
There are other signs behavioural advertising might be a gigantically self-serving con too.
As someone who spent years defending Connerly's integrity in arguments with progressives who viewed him a self-hating con artist, the thought that something other than ideological conviction might have motivated him is humiliating.
When his Othello told the Venetian senators of his encounters with "the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders", it was with the wicked twinkle of the self-aggrandising con-man.
