The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  In theory, I had the easiest job imaginable: I could make up whatever I wanted. Nobody would contradict me if I decided to make Victor a dishwasher, a professional gymnast, a retired assassin. Ultimately, though, I decided that the most compelling narrative was none at all: Victor Cracke, cipher. Let people write the story themselves, and they will insert whatever hopes, dreams, fears, and lusts they want. The piece becomes a Rorschach test. All art of value achieves this to a certain extent, but I suspected that the scale of Victor’s piece, its hallucinogenic totality, would make for a lot of audience countertransference. That, or a boatload of confusion.

  I thus found myself answering a lot of opening-night questions the same way.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We don’t really know.”

  “That’s a good question. I don’t know if I know that.”

  Or:

  “What do you think?”

  At an opening, you can identify the novice by his interest in the work. Gallery people don’t bother to look at all. They’re there for the wine and crackers, and to talk about who’s up or down this week.

  “Smashing,” Marilyn said, tipping back her plastic cup.

  “Thank you.”

  “I brought you a present. Did you notice?”

  "Where.”

  "There, silly.” She nosed at a tall, handsome man in a slim-cut suit.

  I looked at her with surprise. Kevin Hollister was a good friend of Marilyn’s, her ex-husband’s Groton roommate. Quarterbacking Harvard to three Ivy League titles earned him a spectacularly cushy banking job right out of school, and ever since then he’s been on the rise. He lives, you might say, comfortably. His hedge fund is named Downfield.

  Recently he had turned his attention from shorting Eastern European currencies to art, a typical Culture Climber, to whom a canvas was little more than an expensive ticket to an exclusive party. I am forever astonished at how men with money and brains—men who control world markets, run major corporations, have the ear of politicians—become dribbling imbeciles in front of a painting. Not knowing where to begin, they run to the nearest source of guidance, no matter how biased or mercenary.

  In a spectacular display of poor judgment, Hollister had hired Marilyn as a consultant, giving her what amounted to a private tap on his bank account. Needless to say, she had sold him work exclusively by artists she represented, barking at anyone who tried to step onto her territory. Earlier she had told me, “He doesn’t appreciate that a world-class collection is the product of thought and patience, and cannot be created in one fell swoop. But I’m happy to help him try.”

  I’d met him once or twice, but we’d never spoken for more than a few minutes, and never about art. That Marilyn had brought him tonight meant one of two things: she thought Victor Cracke was good, or she considered me and my art no threat at all to her monopoly.

  “I’m expanding his horizons,” she said. She winked at me and went to take Hollister’s arm.

  I worked the room all evening, chatting up the usual suspects. Jocko Steinberger, who looked as though he hadn’t shaved since his own opening the previous December, came and spent the whole evening staring catatonically at one drawing. We had a surprise visit from Étienne St. Mauritz, who, along with Castelli and Emmerich, used to be one of the premier American dealers. Now he was old, a liver-spotted demigod being wheeled around by a woman in a long fur coat and Christian Louboutin heels. He thought the work excellent and told me so.

  Nat brought his boyfriend and they hit it off talking to another dealer named Glenn Steiger, a former assistant to Ken Noland with a dirty mouth and an arsenal of dirty stories. As I passed them I overheard him saying, “…tried to buy a canvas from me with forty-eight thousand dollars… in one-dollar bills… that fucking reeked of marijuana… fucking playgroundmoney…”

  Ruby, her hair in a complex plait, had sequestered herself near the Cracke journals. I’d never met her date before, although she’d spoken of him in the past.

  “Ethan, this is Lance DePauw.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Same here.” Lance’s eyes were bloodshot and in constant motion. He, too, smelled like playground money. “This is some pretty crazy shit.”

  “We’ve been looking at the food journal,” Ruby said. “I find it comforting, the way he always ate the same thing. My mom used to pack me lunches, and she’d always give me the same sandwich, cream cheese and jelly. That’s what this reminds me of.”

  “That,” Lance said, “or prison.”

  We all looked at the food journal for a moment.

  Lance said, “Whack.”

  From across the room, Marilyn waved at me. I excused myself and went over to talk to Hollister. His handshake was not at all the masculine vise clamp you’d expect, but dry and wary. I noticed also that he had a manicure.

  “We were just admiring this piece,” Marilyn said.

  “Good choice,” I said.

  “Am I right in thinking this is the center of the piece? Ethan?”

  I nodded. “Panel number one.”

  “How bizarre,” Marilyn said. “What are those? Babies?”

  “They look like cherubs,” said Hollister.

  “Funny you say that,” I said. “That’s how we refer to them. ‘Victor’s Cherubs.’ ”

  At the center of panel one was a five-pointed star, its dull brown an uncharacteristically muted note in an otherwise lurid palette. Around it danced a ring of winged children, their beatific faces in stark contrast to the rest of the map, which teemed with agitation and bloodshed. Victor had been a very capable draftsman, but evidently these figures had been important enough to him that he wanted to take no chances: they had been rendered with a precision that suggested tracing rather than freehand.

  Marilyn said, “They look—oh, I don’t know. Like Botticelli meets Sally Mann. Sort of pedophilic, don’t you think?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her.

  Hollister leaned in and squinted. “It’s in remarkably good condition, all things considered.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the place when it was like that?” he asked, gesturing to a wall where I had hung enlarged photos of the apartment before disassembly.

  “I discovered it,” I said. Behind him, I saw Marilyn smile.

  “Kevin would like to learn more about the artist.”

  “I honestly don’t know how much more I can tell you,” I said.

  “How would you compare him to other outsider artists?” Hollister said.

  “Well,” I said, shooting a quick evil eye at Marilyn, “I’m not sure that I’d call him an outsider artist.”

  Hollister blanched, and I quickly added, “Per se. I’m not sure, per se, that he’s comparable to any other artist—although you might be right, then, in calling him an outsider artist, because part of what defines outsider art is its lack of reference.”

  Behind him, Marilyn rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

  I spooled out a lot of textbook stuff on Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, the anticultural movement. “Usually we’re referring to work created by prisoners, children, and the insane, and I’m not sure that Cracke was any of those, per se.”

  “I think he was all three,” said Marilyn.

  “He was a child?” asked Hollister. “I thought he was old.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I mean—yes. No, he wasn’t a child.”

  “How old was he?”

  “We don’t know, precisely.”

  “I don’t mean literally,” said Marilyn. “I mean look at his concept of the world. It’s so juvenile. Dancing angels? Come on. Who does that? You can’t do that sort of thing with a straight face, you just can’t, and I think it’s terribly sweet that he did.”

  “Cloying,” said Hollister.

  “It might be, except the bulk of it’s not like that at all—just the opposite, it’s so awful and gory. That’s what makes the piece interesting to me
, the extremity of the two emotions at work. I think—you can tell me if I’m wrong, Ethan—but it looks to me like there are two Victor Crackes: the one who draws puppies and cupcakes and fairy rings, and the one”—she pointed to a canvas filled with graphic battle scenes—“who draws decapitations and torture and so on.” She smiled at me. “What do you think.”

  I shrugged. “He was trying to encompass everything he saw. He saw kindness and he saw cruelty. It’s not two Victor Crackes: it’s the fault of the world, for being inconsistent.”

  Marilyn gestured around the room. “You can’t deny that the work has a crazed quality to it. The obsession with filling in every square inch of the page… Only a madman would draw for forty years and stick it all in a box.”

  I admitted that my first thought had been as such.

  “See, there you go. That’s part of its appeal, of course.”

  “All I know is it’s good.”

  “Well, fine, but wouldn’t you feel a little less inclined to show it if you knew it was an SVA student’s senior thesis?”

  “An SVA student couldn’t produce anything this honest,” I said. “That’s exactly the point.”

  “Now you’re sounding like Dubuffet.”

  “Fine. I think it’s refreshing not to have to think four levels of irony deep.”

  “Let’s imagine, for a second, that he was a criminal—”

  “Hang on,” I said.

  “I’m just saying. As a thought experiment.”

  “There’s nothing to suggest that. He was a loner. He never bothered anybody.”

  “Isn’t that what they say about serial killers?” she said. “ ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ ”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Regardless,” she said, “the term outsider artist seems right to me.”

  I didn’t really believe that Victor Cracke could be so easily and neatly packaged. But I inferred from Marilyn’s expression that she was trying to do me a favor by giving Hollister something concrete to cling to. He was, I gathered, a labels-and-categories kind of guy.

  “We can call him that,” I said. I smiled at Hollister. “For argument’s sake.” He squinted at the canvas again. “What does it mean.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  He spent a few moments pursing and unpursing his lips. “Nothing, inherently.”

  We decided to leave it at that.

  All evening long I kept an eye out for Tony Wexler. I had sent him an invitation—pointedly addressed to his home rather than to the office. I knew he couldn’t come. He never did. He couldn’t come if my father had been snubbed, and I invariably snubbed my father, which mooted the whole point of sending Tony an invitation.

  Given his interest in the artist, and his contribution to the discovery of the work, I had figured that I’d at least get a phone call. But I’d heard nothing. It rankled a tiny bit. Even the goddamn superintendent, Shaughnessy, showed up, stuffed into a heavy sport jacket that had not recently seen the light of day. At first I thought he was some artist dressed deliberately down, a crude parody of a lower-middle-class wardrobe. Then he waved at me from afar and my memory clicked into place: the smudged glasses, the thick wrists. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he’d come—or how he had even known about the show. I mentioned this to Nat and he told me that—per my request—we’d sent postcards to everyone I’d interviewed as a way of thanking them.

  I was bewildered. “I said to do that?”

  Nat smiled. “Senile already.”

  “I’ve been living in a bubble,” I said. “Anyhow I doubt I expected anyone to take the invitation seriously.”

  “He did.”

  “Indeed.” I felt bad for Shaughnessy, who spent the evening walking around and around the drawings, awkwardly trying to pick up the tails of other conversations. Finally, I went over to shake his hand.

  He waved at the canvases. “Something else, huh? Was I right?”

  “You were.”

  “I know it when I see it.”

  “You certainly do.”

  “I like this one.” He showed me where Victor had drawn a bridge— Ruby thought it looked like the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—turning into a dragon whose tongue forked and grew into the air trails of a jet, which flew into an ocean, which itself became the open mouth of a giant fish… and so forth. The pictures tended to nest inside one another, so that every time you had found the largest unit, you discovered, upon the addition of more panels, a more impressive superstructure.

  “Wild stuff,” said Shaughnessy.

  I nodded.

  “So’d you sell any yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You think you will?”

  I glanced at Hollister. “I hope so.”

  Shaughnessy licked his lips. “Hey, lemme ask you something. You think I might be able to get some?”

  For a moment I thought I was being propositioned. “Get some.”

  “Yeah, you know.”

  “You mean—buy a drawing?”

  “Not so much.” He licked his lips again.

  “What then.”

  “Like a commission.” He smiled. “Finder’s fee.”

  In the distance I saw Hollister talking to Marilyn as they headed for the front door. I said, “You want me to give you one of the drawings.”

  Abruptly he reddened. “It’s not like they’re yours.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and left Shaughnessy standing there.

  Before going, Hollister handed me a card and asked me to call him on Monday. He left a wake; everyone stepped aside to watch him go. They had been tracking him all evening long, eager to learn if he was no longer off-limits as a client.

  I turned to find Shaughnessy again and spotted him across the room, furiously stuffing canapés into his mouth. Then he concealed an entire bottle of wine inside his coat, rolled up three exhibition catalogues, and left without saying good-bye.

  THE ONE TRUE DARK SPOT on an otherwise bright evening arrived close to the end, when only I, my staff, and a handful of the hardest-core booze moochers remained. Nat, having gone behind the front desk for some promotional postcards, tried to intercept Kristjana, but she blew right past him. He then ran to warn me, but by then it was too late: she had taken her position in the middle of the gallery.

  All eyes fell on her. How can you ignore a six-foot Icelandic manic-depressive with a boot-camp hairdo, her mouth sealed with duct tape, wearing a—

  “Is that a straitjacket?” Ruby whispered.

  It was. A red patent-leather one.

  “Asylum, by Jean Paul Gaultier,” Nat whispered.

  We were whispering because we knew that we had all been co-opted into a piece of performance art.

  It didn’t last long. She held her arms up to the sky, arched her back gracefully, and slowly—very, very slowly—began to peel the tape from her face. The sizzle of glue was audible throughout the entire gallery. It hurt to watch. With a flick of her wrist she sent the tape fluttering to the ground. Then she whipped her torso forward and expelled a shockingly large quantity of mucus smack in the middle of my gallery floor, where it sat, glistening, like a frog.

  She turned on her heel and marched out.

  The first person to react was Ruby’s friend Lance. Everyone else was still too stunned to move, but he got up from where he’d been sitting in the corner and ambled toward the loogie, which had begun to send out little drippy green tendrils. From somewhere inside his track jacket he produced a handheld video camera. He switched it on, twisted off the lens cap, and knelt to get a close-up of Kristjana’s latest work.

  • 5 •

  The show was a hit. I got good notices in the trades, including one in ArtBox by an old friend who loved nothing more than to swim against the stream, and who I had expected to eviscerate me. The Musée D’Arte Brut, the modern-day outgrowth of Jean Dubuffet’s personal collection, expressed interest in bringing the work over to Lausanne. And somebody must have tipped off the Times, because the
y sent over a reporter—not from Arts but from the metro section.

  I waffled over whether to talk to him. Everyone knows that when it comes to the avant-garde, the Times is all but irrelevant; their report on a trend marks the surest sign that said trend has declined and fallen. Furthermore, I worried about how they would spin me. With very little stretching of the truth I could come off as a vulture, feasting off the remains of the poor and disenfranchised.

  In the end, though, I had to agree. Otherwise I had no control over the situation whatsoever; I couldn’t stop them from running the article, magnifying my lack of comment into a self-indictment.

  The same traits that make me a good salesmen make me a good interviewee, and when the article came out, I was pleased to see that I had convinced the journalist we were friends. He called the show “hypnotic” and “unsettling” and printed a large close-up of one of Victor’s Cherubs on the front page of the section. My picture didn’t look too bad, either.

  Irrelevant or not to me, the Times carries a certain prestige, particularly in the minds of Culture Climbers. Within days I had gotten several offers far above the ones I’d gotten on opening night. On Marilyn’s advice, I put everyone off until I’d spoken to Kevin Hollister, who she promised would call as soon as he got back from Cap Juluca.

  She didn’t disappoint. Two days later he asked me to lunch at a place on the ground floor of a midtown skyscraper that he owned. The restaurant staff hovered and swirled around him, whisking away his coat as he shucked it, pulling his chair out, draping his lap with a napkin, pressing his cocktail of choice into his hand before he had uttered a word. Throughout this frenzy he appeared not to notice anyone but me, asking how I’d gotten into art, how I’d met Marilyn, and so on. We were seated in a private room, where the chef personally presented us with an assortment of gemlike sushi. It was excellent. Hollister called for another round and, midway through it, offered me a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for the Cherubs. I told him that sounded low, especially considering that in giving him a single canvas I’d be breaking up the integrity of the piece as a whole—which really ought to stay together. Without batting an eye he doubled the figure.