Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  Patron of the Arts

  William Rotsler

  Patron of the Arts

  by William Rotsler

  Part of this novel first appeared in Vertex, © 1973

  Mankind Publishing Co.

  Copyright © 1974 by William Rotsler

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  1

  She stares out at you from her cube of near blackness, calm, quiet, breathing easily, just looking at you. She is naked to the hips, where a jeweled girdle encircles her, and she sits regally on a pile of luxurious pillows. Her long white hair cascades down over her apricot-colored shoulders and is made to shimmer slightly by some hidden light.

  As you come closer to the life-size sensatron the vibrations get to you. The startling reality of the three-dimensional image cannot be overstated, for Michael Cilento’s portrait of one of history’s greatest society courtesans is a great work of art.

  As you view the cube the image of Diana Snowdragon stops being quite so calm and in some subtle way becomes predatory, commanding, compelling. She is naked, not nude. The drifting bell sounds of melora musicians are heard . . . almost. The power of her unique personality is overwhelming, as it is in person, but in this artist’s interpretation there are many other facets exposed.

  Diana’s sensatron cube portrait is universally hailed as a masterpiece. The subject was delighted.

  The artist was disgusted and told me that the ego of the subject prevented her from seeing the reality he had constructed. But it was this cube that gave Michael Benton Cilento the fame he wanted, needed, and hated. This was his first major sensatron cube and cubes were just then beginning to be used by artists, instead of scientists. It was becoming “fashionable” to be working in sensatrons then and everywhere there was shop talk of electron brushes, cilli nets, multilayer screens, broadcast areas, blankers, and junction symmetry. Sensatrons are the ultimate marriage of art and science. At least so far. The sciences are constantly supplying tools to the artists, whether it be fade-safe paint that will be bright a thousand years from now, or an electron brush to make meticulous changes in a scan pattern. Already the quiver groups are exploring the new brain-wave instruments that create music only in the brain itself.

  But the sensatrons are the rage of the moment. Just as the shimmercloth fashions of the quiver generation were seized by the media and exploited, the advertising world is impatient for immense sensatrons to be made possible, building-size product replicas with “Buy me!”

  shouting in your forebrain. In anticipation I have started one of my research labs on a blanker device to shut out the anticipated electronic noise.

  The cubes can be so eerily lifelike that the rumors of them taking a piece of your soul persist. Perhaps they are right. Not only do the cameras capture the exterior, providing the basis from which the sensatron artist works, but the alpha and beta recorders, the EEG

  machines, the subtle heartbeat repeaters, all record what is going on within. Many artists use a blending of many recordings taken over a period of sittings. Some use single specific moments or moods, each recorded and then projected by the differentiated sonic cones and alpha-beta projectors. Along with these projections the artist adds his own interpretation, creating an almost musical concerto of waves, working upon any human brain within the area of reception. It is still the prerogative of the artist to select, eliminate, diminish, or whatever he desires. Some sensatron portrait artists put in the emotional warts as well as the strengths, and others are flatterers. Some artists are experimenting with switched recordings, woman for man, animal for subject, pure abstracts substituting for reality. Every one that attempts it brings to it a new point of view.

  All Mike Cilento wanted to do is project the truth as he saw it. Perhaps he did peel off a layer of soul. I have stood next to the living model of a sensatron portrait and found the cube much more interesting than the person, but only when the artist was greater than the subject. Mike’s

  portrait

  of

  society’s

  most

  infamous—and

  richest—wanton made him famous overnight. Even the repro cubes you can buy today are impressive, but the original, with its original subtle circuits and focused broadcasts, is staggering.

  A collector in Rome brought Cilento to my attention and when I had seen the Snowdragon cube I managed an introduction. We met at Santini’s villa in Ostia. Like most young artists he had heard of me. We met by a pool and his first words were, “You sponsored Wiesenthal for years, didn’t you?” I nodded, wary now, for with every artist you help there are ten who demand it.

  “His Montezuma opera was trash.”

  I smiled. “It was well received.”

  “He did not understand that Aztec anymore than he understood Cortez.” He looked at me with a challenge.

  “I agree, but by the time I heard it, it was too late.” He relaxed and kicked his foot in the water and squinted at two nearly nude daughters of a lunar mineral baron who were walking by. He seemed to have made his point and had nothing more to say.

  Cilento intrigued me. In the course of a number of years of

  “discovering” artists I had met all types, from the shy ones who hide to the burly ones who demand my patronage. And I had met the kind who seem indifferent to me, as Cilento seemed to be. But many others had acted that way and I had learned to disregard everything but finished work and the potential for work.

  “Your Snowdragon cube was superb,” I said.

  He nodded and squinted in another direction. “Yeah,” he said. Then as an afterthought he added, “Thank you.” We spoke for a moment of the cube and he told me what he thought of its subject.

  “But it made you famous,” I said.

  He squinted at me and after a moment he said, “Is that what art is about?”

  I laughed. “Fame is very useful. It opens doors. It makes things possible. It makes it easier to be even more famous.”

  “It gets you laid,” Cilento said with a smile.

  “It can get you killed, too,” I added.

  “It’s a tool, Mr. Thorne, just like molecular circuits or dynamic integration or a screwdriver. But it can give you freedom. I want that freedom; every artist needs it.”

  “That’s why you picked Diana?”

  He grinned and nodded. “Besides, that female was a great challenge.”

  “I imagine so,” I said and laughed, thinking of Diana at seventeen, beautiful and predatory, clawing her way up the monolithic walls of society.

  We had a drink together, then shared a psychedelic in the ruins of a temple of Vesta, and became Mike and Brian to each other. We sat on old stones and leaned against the stub of a crumbling column and looked down at the lights of Santini’s villa.

  “An artist needs freedom,” Mike said, “more than he needs paint or electricity or cube diagrams or stone. Or food. You can always get the materials, but the freedom to use them is precious. There is only so much time.”

  “What about money? That’s freedom, too,” I said.

  “Sometimes. You can have money and no freedom, though. But usually fame brings money.” I nodded, thinking that in my case it was the other way around.

  We looked out at the light of a half-moon on the Tyrrhenian Sea and had our thoughts. I thought of Madelon.

  “There’s someone I’d like you to do,” I said. “A woman. A very special woman.”

  “Not right now,” he said. “Perhaps later. I have several commissions that I want to do.”

  “Keep me in mind when you have time. She’s a very unusual woman.”

  He glanced at me and tossed
a pebble down the hill. “I’m sure she is,” he said.

  “You like to do women, don’t you?” I asked.

  He smiled in the moonlight and said, “You figured that out from one cube?”

  “No. I bought the three small ones you did before.”

  He looked at me sharply. “How did you know they even existed? I hadn’t told anyone.”

  “Something as good as the Snowdragon cube couldn’t come out of nowhere. There had to be something earlier. I hunted down the owners and bought them.”

  “The old lady is my grandmother,” he said. “I’m a little sorry I sold it, but I needed money.” I made a mental note to have it sent back to him.

  “Yes, I like doing women,” he said softly, leaning back against the pale column. “Artists have always liked doing women. To . . . to capture that elusive shadow of a flicker of a glimpse of a moment . . . in paint, in stone, in clay, or in wood, or on film . . . or with molecular constructs.”

  “Rubens saw them plump and gay,” I said. “Lautrec saw them depraved and real.”

  “To Da Vinci they were mysterious,” he said. “Matisse saw them idle and voluptuous. Michelangelo hardly saw them at all. Picasso saw them in endless mad variety.”

  “Gauguin . . . sensuality,” I commented. “Henry Moore saw them as abstracts, a starting point for form. Van Gogh’s women reflected his own mad genius brain.”

  “Cezanne saw them as placid cows,” Mike laughed. “Fellini saw them as multifaceted creatures that were part angel, part beast. In the photographs of Andre de Dienes the women are realistic fantasies, erotic and strange.”

  “Tennessee Williams saw them as insane cannibals, fascinatingly repulsive. Steinberg’s women were unreal, harsh, dramatic,” I said.

  “Clayton’s females were predatory fiends.”

  “Jason sees them as angels, slightly confused,” Mike said, delighted with the little game. “Coogan saw them as motherly monsters.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  He stopped and the smile faded. After a long moment he answered. “As illusions, I suppose.”

  He rolled a fragment of stone from the time of Caesar in his fingers and spoke softly, almost to himself.

  “They . . . aren’t quite real, somehow. The critics say I created a masterpiece of erotic realism, a milestone in figurative art. But . . . they’re

  . . . wisps. They’re incredibly real for only an instant . . . fantastically shadowy another. Women are never the same from moment to moment. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate me.”

  I didn’t see Mike for some time after that, though we kept in touch. He did a portrait of Princess Helga of the Netherlands, quite modestly clad, the cube filled with its famous dozen golden sculptures and the vibrations of love and peace.

  For the monks at Wells, on Mars, Mike did a large cube of Buddha, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. Repro cubes made a small fortune for the monastery.

  Anything Mike chose to do was quickly bought and commissions flowed in from individuals, companies and foundations, even from movements. What he did was a simple nude of his mistress of the moment. It was erotic enough in pose, but powerfully pornographic in vibrations, and after Mike left her she received a Universal-Metro contract. The young Shah of Iran bought the cube to install in his long-abuilding Gardens of Babylon.

  For his use of alpha, beta, and gamma wave projectors, as well as advances in differentiated sonics, Mike was the subject of an entire issue of Modern Electronics.

  Mike had paid his dues to art, for while studying at Cal Tech he had worked on the Skyshield Project, a systems approach to electronic defense against low energy particles to use on the space stations. After graduation he had gone to work at the Bell lab in their brain-wave complex on Long Island. He quit when he got a Guggenheim grant for his art.

  From his “Pleasurewoman” cube General Electric picked up some of Mike’s modifications for their new multilayer image projectors and beta wave generators. For the artists that use models or three-dimensional objects to record the basic image cycle—such as breathing, running water, or repeating events—Nakamura, Ltd. brought out a new camera design in circular pattern distribution that contained many of Mike’s suggestions. For the artist working in original abstractions, Mike built his own ultra-fine electron brush and an image generator linked with a graphics computer that produced an almost infinite number of variables. Mike Cilento was proving himself as an innovator and engineer as well as artist, an unusual combination. I met Mike again at the opening of his “Solar System” series in the Grand Museum in Athens. The ten cubes hung from the ceiling, each with its nonliteral interpretation of the sun and planets, from the powerball of Sol to the hard, shiny ballbearing of Pluto.

  Mike seemed caged, a tiger in a trap, but very happy to see me. He was a volunteer kidnapee as I spirited him away to my apartment in the old part of town.

  He sighed as we entered, tossed his jacket into a Lifestyle chair and strolled out onto the balcony. I picked up two glasses and a bottle of Cretan wine and joined him.

  He sighed again, sank into the chair, and sipped the wine. I chuckled and said, “Fame getting too much for you?”

  He grunted at me. “Why do they always want the artist at openings? The art speaks for itself.”

  “Public relations. To touch the hem of creativity. Maybe some of it will rub off on them.” He grunted again, and we lapsed into comfortable silence, looking out at the Parthenon, high up and night-lit. At last he spoke. “Being an artist is all I ever wanted to be, like kids growing up to be astronauts or ball players. It’s an honor to be able to do it, whatever it is. I’ve painted and I’ve sculpted. I’ve done light mosaics and glow dot patterns. I even tried music for awhile. None of them really seemed to be it. But I think molecular constructs are the closest.”

  “Because of the extreme realism?”

  “That’s part of it. Abstraction, realism, expressionism—they’re just labels. What matters is what is, the thoughts and emotions that you transmit. The sensatron units are fairly good tools. You can work almost directly on the emotions. When GE gets the new ones ready, I think it will be possible to get even more subtle shadings with the alpha waves. And, of course, with more units you can get more complex.”

  “You are as much an engineer as you are an artist,” I said. He smiled and sipped his wine. “Every medium, every technique has those who find that area their particular feast. Look at actors. Once there was only the play, from start to finish, no retakes and live. Then came film and tape and events shot out of sequence. No emotional line to follow from start to finish. It takes a particular kind of actor who can discipline himself to those flashbacks and flashforwards. In the days of mime there were probably superb actors lost because their art was in their voice.”

  “And today?” I prompted.

  “Today the artist who cannot master electronics has a difficult time in many of the arts. Leonardo da Vinci could have, but probably not Michelangelo. There are many fine artists born out of their time, in both directions.”

  I asked a question I had often asked artists working in nontraditional media. “Why is the sensatron such a good medium for you?”

  “It is immensely versatile. A penline can only do a certain number of things and hint at others. An oil painting is static. It attempts to be real but is a frozen moment. But sometimes frozen moments are better than motion. A motion picture, a tape, a play all convey a variety of meanings and emotions, even changes of location and perspective. As such they are very good tools. The more you can communicate the better. With the power of the sensatron you can transmit to the viewer such emotions, such feelings, that he becomes a participant, not just a viewer. Involvement. Commitment. I wouldn’t do a sensatron to communicate some things, just because it’s so much work and the communication minor. But the sensatron units can do almost anything any other art form can do. That’s why I like it. Not because it’s the fashionable art form right now.”

  “You�
�ve had no trouble getting your first license?” I asked.

  “No, the Guggenheim people fixed it.” He shook his head. “The idea of having to have a license to do a piece of art seems bizarre.” He lifted his hand before I spoke. “Yeah, I know. If they didn’t watch who had control of alpha and omega projectors we’d be trooping to the polls to vote for a dictator and not even know we didn’t want to. Or so they think.”

  “It’s a powerful force, difficult to fight. Your own brain is telling you to buy, buy, buy, use, use, use, and that’s pretty hard to fight. Think of it like prescription drugs.”

  He nodded his head. “Can’t you just see it? ‘I’m sorry, Michelangelo, but this piece of Carrara marble needs a priority IX

  license and you have only a IV.’ And Michelangelo says, ‘But I want to do this statue of David, see? Big, tall boy, with a sling, kinda sullen looking. It isn’t because he’ll be nude, is it?’ ‘You just go to the Art Control Board in beautiful downtown Florence, Signor Buonarroti, and fil out the papers in triplicate, last name first, first name last. And remember neatness counts. Speak to Pope Julius, maybe he can fix it for you.’ ”

  We laughed gently in the night. “But art and technology are coexisting more now than ever,” I said.

  “Oh, I understand,” Mike sighed, “but I don’t have to like it.” I thought about the Pornotron someone had given me, hanging from the ceiling of my Moscow apartment. One night with a healthy blonde clarinetist had been enough to convince me I didn’t need artificial enhancement of my sexual pleasures. It was like being force-fed your favorite dessert.

  We lapsed into silence. The ancient city murmured at us. I thought about Madelon.

  “I still want you to do that portrait of someone very close to me.”

  I reminded him.

  “Soon. I want to do a cube on a girl I know first. But I must find a new place to work. They bother me there, now that they found where I am.”

  I mentioned my villa on Sikinos, in the Aegean, and Mike seemed interested, so I offered it to him. “There’s an ancient grain storage there you could use as a studio. They have a controlled plasma fusion plant so there would be as much power as you need. There’s a house, just the couple that takes care of it, and a very small village nearby. I’d be honored if you’d use it.”