An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  If Warhol had stepped into the Cedar Tavern bar, where all the tough-guy Abstract Expressionists hung out, he would have certainly been beaten up for ordering a milk. The shift from muscled, dynamic strokes of an angry brush, intended to reflect inner turmoil, to slack-armed pulls of silk-screened burlap, intended to pose as wallpaper, meant that the slow evolution of art had been upended. Art was no longer tough-guy stuff.

  It was easy to give Pop critical status—there were lots of sophisticated things to say about it—but it was tougher to justify the idea that repetitive silk screens were rivals of great masters. If Cubism was speaking from the intellect, and Abstract Expressionism was speaking from the psyche, then Pop was speaking from the unbrain, and just to drive home the point, its leader Warhol closely resembled a zombie.

  If you were older and believed in the philosophy of art as rapture, and didn’t expect the next great development in art to be a retreat from beauty and an exploitation of ordinariness, then you couldn’t endorse Warhol as the next great master. But if you were young, with essentially no stake in art’s past, not caring about the difficulty of paint versus the ease of silk screen, you saw the images unencumbered, as bright and funny, but most of all ironic. This new art started with the implied tag “This is ironic, so I’m just kidding,” but shortly the tag changed to “This is ironic, and I’m not kidding.”

  Lacey had been primed in the old art world, so the leap she was about to make took effort, but her heart was leading her head. The flower picture had piqued her interest, and the next day she slipped out of her office, five minutes at a time, to thumb through the library, turning page after page of Warhols, until her desire for the picture had risen to overflowing. She also checked auction prices on Andy Warhol flower paintings. Made in 1964, they were the least expensive of his significant pictures, rounding out at about fifteen thousand dollars for one of the small ones. She came to the conclusion that if Warhol was about deadness, the flower pictures were the deadest of them all. This was, as far as Lacey could remember, the first time she was affected not only by the object itself, but by its theory.

  The next Saturday, Lacey went to the Robert Miller Gallery to check in on the picture. It was no longer on the wall, but she didn’t let that bother her; pictures were often moved around at galleries. She inquired about it and was taken into an office where the picture had been rehung. A rep came in, a Ms. Adams, who startled Lacey with her youth, and gave her a pitch on the painting. “Comes from a collector who knew Warhol… in excellent condition… signed by Warhol on the back, which is rare… is approved by the Warhol estate.” Lacey was instantly relieved that a problem was solved that she didn’t know existed. After some haggling, she bought the picture for sixteen thousand dollars.

  Robert Miller came in to congratulate her and meet this unknown new collector. “It’s a lovely piece,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Lacey, “it reached out and snagged me.”

  “I like these rich blacks, and how defined the stems are in the background. It’s a wonderful example,” said Miller, “and it’s got great wall power.”

  “It stopped me from thirty feet away.”

  “Don’t you love the relationship of the colors?” he said.

  “Well, yes, but…” She hesitated. “I guess what I really love is…” Miller hung on his toes and looked at her through her long pause. “I love the way the moonlight is reflected on the water.”

  24.

  IN A COUPLE OF MONTHS, Lacey had spent, quite unexpectedly, twenty-four thousand dollars on art. To feel comfortable spending that much in a short time, one must, I assume, have a multiple of that at least ten or twenty times. That is, unless you are far gone. I think Lacey was far gone for several months, perhaps deprived of oxygen from her long Russian flights. She also must have put forty thousand down on her apartment, and she had been generally liberal with cash at restaurants, and tips flowed like Bacchus’s wine. No matter what amount she came into, I knew Lacey was not like a lottery winner who would wind up paranoid and broke, muttering, “It’s all gone.” She saw every action as bearing a response: every penny spent, somehow, would have a return, if not this year, then another; if not in kind, then in another form. But in spite of this practicality, she also—and this is what confuses me—could be rash. She was rash with people, with her body, her remarks. Lacey had an extraordinary sense of position: who was above her, who was below her. However, she considered no one her peer. She was equally reckless with all. So where was I in Lacey’s world? I was, officially, a supporter of Lacey, like Angela and Sharon, told I was great, told I was loved. As she would say, “I need you guys so much.”

  25.

  THE WARHOL QUICKLY displaced the Aivazovsky, which was moved to the bathroom. Having an eight-thousand-dollar picture in the bathroom amused her for about a week, then she thought of possible damage that could occur, including being lacquered with hairspray, bubbled by heat from a hair dryer, or sprayed with steam from the shower, and she moved it to the bedroom. For the next month or so, whenever she passed the Warhol, she felt her head crane toward it, as if it were a kid in a cradle that had to be checked in on, not only to see if it was all right, but for the sake of looking at something in which she had so much invested. She did not check in as one would on a stock, to see how the price was doing, but to see how her emotional investment was doing. When visitors came, if they didn’t admire the picture—or worse, didn’t notice it—she would think them stupid or confused, and they were moved to the bottom of her list of worthwhile people.

  In the past few weeks, Lacey had unintentionally balanced her lopsided art world equation: She now knew what it was like to stand on the other side of a transaction. She had experienced the lunacy that can overtake the mind when standing before its inexplicable object of desire, in this case the Warhol, and she had felt the sudden, ego-driven impulses that spark the irrational purchase, in that case the Aivazovsky. She had, in just a few weeks, experienced buyer’s remorse, buyer’s rejoice, and the extremes of nervousness associated with first dates and executions. She was now able to put herself inside a collector’s head, know that she was treating a blessed illness, and determine the appropriate bedside manner.

  One night, she lay on her sofa peering over a book at the Warhol, and she retraced her route toward it, which led her to think about Ms. Adams at the Robert Miller Gallery. She liked that Ms. Adams was dealing with customers, unlike her backroom work at Sotheby’s, and thought, I could be her.

  26.

  BECOMING MS. ADAMS began sooner than Lacey was expecting. The 1997 American paintings sales were listless, even though they were given a small boost with the sale of the remains of the property of Andrew Crispo, an ex-dealer whose precise eye for American art was complicated by his proximity to sordid sex scandals—one a brutal torture-murder—and jail time for tax evasion. In the 1980s, he had sold over ninety million dollars in American paintings to Baron Thyssen, and many of them now hang in Thyssen’s museum near the Prado in Madrid. Acquitted of the especially seedy sex murder in 1985 that involved leather masks and mouth-balls, he was also a victim, if one could call him that, of tabloid excess when it was reported that sadomasochistic leather masks were found in his gallery, thus indicting him, at least in the newspapers. The press didn’t realize that these masks were the work of artist Nancy Grossman—intellectually distant from those found in adult sado-shops—and unwearable. Crispo had vanished from the art world for years, three of which could be accounted for by time spent in the slammer; but this year he poked his head into a Christie’s preview, and it was as though the other dealers in the room were pointing at him, shouting, “Unclean!”

  But even as slow sales eroded the glamour of older American painting, there was an unexpected upswing in contemporary sales, and Lacey was still a valuable employee who was making connections with collectors and dealers. When Cherry Finch called her into her office in January 1998, Lacey was expecting good news. Tanya Ross watched her go in the office, watc
hed the door being closed, watched and waited, knowing that if the rumor was true, Lacey would be coming out worse off than when she went in. A half hour later, Lacey had been fired, and she explained why to no one.

  27.

  IT WAS THE coldest day of February when Lacey flew to Atlanta for Kitty Owen’s funeral. This conjunction of dire events was not Lacey’s world crashing down around her: her grandmother, at ninety-six, was old enough that it felt as though her death had already happened even before it happened, and Lacey’s release from Sotheby’s was quiet enough and even accompanied by a vague but believable letter of recommendation from Cherry Finch. She told her family in Atlanta that she was moving to a gallery, which was true—that is, if events that have yet to happen but probably will can be counted as true.

  Lacey’s parents, Hart and Meg, were intelligent and cultured, two qualities that ride along effortlessly in households where the discussion of art is routine, though it’s difficult to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg. The memorial was sensible, held in their living room in the early afternoon, with people speaking solemnly about the departed; a delightful letter was read aloud, written seventy-five years earlier from Maxfield Parrish to Kitty, and the Parrish print was featured over the fireplace. The early dark of the afternoon segued into cocktails after the children were trundled off. Hart and Meg had been the ones to attend to Kitty during her waning years, and the estate was passed down to Meg, though there was a will to be discussed, essentially a dispersal of gifts to friends and family.

  As Lacey wandered around the house she grew up in, each bit of décor provoked in her waves of either affection or revulsion. The sixties modern stand-alone record player, bought as furniture and now used only for its radio, repulsed her. It had become an antique in her lifetime and had no mystique for her. But she felt an affection for the old records she discovered still stacked inside it, the ones she had played with microscopic precision, laying the needle in the groove like a skilled DJ. She held the jacket of the sound track to Xanadu next to her nose and inhaled it as though it were a madeleine, then removed the disk and saw written on the sleeve in her own hand, “Property of Lacey Yeager, age 10.” There were antique dishes and silver plate place settings, there were framed paintings that Lacey now knew were worthy only of a junk shop, there were reproductions of famous paintings that showed her parents’ good taste. Their furniture was in the style of Danish Modern: pieces that had never been near Denmark, and had been manufactured in the sixties, one decade too late to benefit from a growing craze for authentic fifties furnishings.

  Lacey liked her parents, especially her father, but couldn’t trace her character to either one of them. Her father’s gentleness made her wonder where she got her mean streak. Her mother was practical, but hardly a prototype for her scalpel personality. Lacey was, however, bused as a child to a tough school. She’d often had to defend her modestly better financial status, exemplified by a pretty dress or lunch box depicting the latest TV fad. The usual options for coping were stoicism or aggression, but Lacey chose another: cunning. It had been cultivated from her childhood reading of age-inappropriate literature, encouraged by her mother and book-learned aunts. In children’s literature, the clever foxes were often the bad guys, but Lacey never thought so.

  Meg took Lacey into a side bedroom. “Lacey, Mom left a little will.”

  “I don’t want anything,” said Lacey. “You keep it.”

  “No, sweetie, it’s not money. She wanted you to have the Parrish print. She said you’re the one in the family who looks most like her and you should have it.”

  Lacey sat on a divan with a look of shock on her face, which changed into a suppressed laugh. “Oh, that is so sweet,” she said. “I’ll keep it forever; I want you to know that.” No one at that time knew that her response, which sounded like gratitude, was infused with relief.

  Lacey took the print back to her new apartment and shuffled a few things around on the walls until it finally found a home low on the wall, beside her bed. She poured herself a glass of wine, sat in her sole bedroom chair, and stared at the picture, thinking that she had experienced incredibly good luck.

  28.

  BY THE LATE 1990s, artists’ output ranged from the gigantic to the minuscule, from the crafted to the careless, the thoughtful to the thoughtless. Richard Serra made art measured in tonnage, while Tom Friedman carved his self-portrait on an aspirin. Work ranged from macho to fey, regardless of the sexual preference of the artist.

  Pilot Mouse edged into the art scene when he spray-painted black bats on walls and doorways around various neighborhoods. He parlayed these art attacks into money by following Jeff Koons’s and Damien Hirst’s template—and, incidentally, Rubens’s and Rembrandt’s: he maintained an art factory. The studio, a derelict warehouse teeming with volunteer assistants, produced paintings and sculpture, and in spite of excoriating critical response, the market responded with cash.

  His breakthrough had come when collector Hinton Alberg, the American equivalent of the dynamic English collector Charles Saatchi, swept through a modest downtown show and bought every one of Mouse’s paintings. The paintings, in retrospect, weren’t that good, but when Hinton Alberg bought them out, they suddenly became good. The theory of relativity certainly applies to art: just as gravity distorts space, an important collector distorts aesthetics. The difference is that gravity distorts space eternally, and a collector distorts aesthetics for only a few years.

  But this purchase was not what made Pilot Mouse a star. It was a revelation, made a few weeks later, that guaranteed he would have at least a decade of tenure as an art star. But to explain it, it is necessary to know a little bit about the eccentricities of Hinton Alberg.

  Untitled, Tom Friedman, 1994

  .25 × .375 × .375 in.

  Alberg was a collector with a quick purse, which delighted those on the receiving end of things. He donated to the most offbeat art functions, as well as to MoMA, Dia, and the Whitney, and therefore had made himself essential to the goings-on of New York art culture, both newfangled and old established. He had a body shaped like a bowling pin and would sometimes accidentally dress like one, too, wearing a white suit with a wide red belt. His wife, Cornelia, was thin where he was wide, and wide where he was thin, so when they stood side by side, they fit together like Texas and Louisiana. There was always a buzz when he entered a room, a buzz that could be described as negative.

  There was a certain unfairness to the bad buzz because Hinton Alberg had at least a sense of humor where his collecting was concerned.

  “I went to the Basel art fair last year. Before I left, Cornelia told me to try to slow down. “ ‘Don’t buy everything, honey,’ she told me. I told her, ‘Darlin’, don’t you know I’m a crazy man?’ ”

  He described his overstuffed warehouse, where he stored his paintings, as either “a junkyard with gems or a gemyard with junk.” But he was shy, too, so word of his humor did not leak into the main body of art society; and there was a disdain for his wealth, which was rumored to come from Cornelia’s old Detroit money.

  Hinton probably had many quirks, but one was highly visible to everyone in the room. He did not drink or abuse himself with anything except food, but he had cultivated or inherited an extraordinarily developed sense of smell, which meant that food was not only devoured but inhaled. Before each meal, he leaned into his plate, sometimes putting a napkin over his head to create an aromatic bell over the food, and took deep, elongated sniffs. From across the room, it looked as though Oliver Hardy had fainted into his food. This exercise was not limited to the entrée, but was employed at appetizer, dessert, and whatever else might appear. It was considered disgusting when a plate of hors d’oeuvres was passed around standees at a cocktail party and Alberg’s nose was suspected of grazing the delectables. Once, it is said, he entered a town house off Madison and sniffed the underside of an antique Italian table.

  After Alberg bought out the show, Pilot Mouse released the news tha
t when he learned Alberg was coming to the gallery, he came in, took down every painting from the wall, turned them backward on the floor, and daubed the stretcher bars with light touches of truffle oil. He then rehung the pictures. When the story broke, Mouse spoke to The New York Times on the phone, saying that he was mocking collectors who bore the smell of money, by making paintings with an odor that was best discerned by a pig.

  This comment made Pilot Mouse popular.

  29.

  BARTON TALLEY HIRED LACEY. She was now the first person a client might see after the receptionist. She was allowed to quote prices, but only after she had judged the client not worthy of Talley. This was a shortcut to success, because what she had learned at Sotheby’s was that the Known don’t always buy pictures; it was often the Unknown who converted from lookers into unexpected buyers. She had to bone up on a new set of artists, this time ones with famous names: Renoir, Modigliani, Balthus, Klee. The bins, unlike those at Sotheby’s, were upstairs, at the end of a suite of offices, and sunlight dribbled in. She had space in one of the many alcoves, even had a private computer. Downstairs was a dimwit receptionist, Donna, who paged her for almost every question that needed answering.

  There was less to do here than at Sotheby’s. Three or four pictures a month came in or went out. There were shows built from inventory, like “Renoir and His Peers,” which needed only one Renoir to ten works by anyone else who had been alive at the same time. “Works on Paper” meant anything that was on paper, regardless of theme or era. Talley also mounted the occasional miniblockbuster, all Giacometti, all de Kooning, some of the pieces borrowed from museums, some from collectors who swore their pieces weren’t for sale but who would succumb to an extravagant offer that came after Talley suggested to a client that the owner was reluctant to sell. In fact, Talley did an extensive trade in pictures that weren’t for sale, because he understood that anything was actually for sale at some price, and it could be harder to sell something that was for sale than it was to sell something that wasn’t for sale. At least in the art business.