An Object of Beauty

by STEVE MARTIN

  She buzzed him in; he climbed the stairs.

  “I thought I’d check in. Nobody can reach anybody,” he said when she opened the door.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I walked,” said Carey.

  “Sixty blocks?”

  “Yeah.” His head gestured toward the TV. “Anything?” he asked.

  “All the same,” she said.

  They were now in the dark, all connections to the outside frozen, all considerations for the outside in suspension. Whatever was about to happen was excusable, was necessary to confirm humanity. As carnal as their night was about to be, they would be visited by a simulacrum of emotion that loomed briefly and moved on. They would be reminded of love without feeling love, reminded of deep human contact without having it.

  It was now Friday morning after the awful Tuesday. Carey and Lacey watched the morning news, then walked funereally to Riverside Park, where they stood and looked where the towers once were. It was shocking that there was no trace of them, no afterimage left in the sky, no outline traced around their perimeter.

  Lacey said, “I know what I was reminded of yesterday.”

  “When?” said Carey.

  “When I first saw the tower burning. The Ruscha.”

  “What Ruscha?”

  “Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.”

  When Carey left, they agreed to postpone his opening until a more practical date. This was the first time Lacey thought of her business, a demonstration of the numbing power of shock. Their sexual encounter was never mentioned again.

  There was still an art world, but there was no art market. Stocks tumbled; who but the crazy would buy pictures when it was unknown if anything would have value, when our main preoccupation was anticipation of further terror? Lacey mourned for her gallery and her dream of self-governorship, but she knew that rage was useless, that this was an act of God, or godlessness, and that she could do nothing until the world righted itself.

  Her gallery finally opened in December, a slow time in the art world, when buyers were about to disappear for the holidays and not straggle back until the second week in January. She sold two paintings by Carey Harden, but they were to his relatives at deep discounts, and the opening party was a fizzle. Patrice Claire was in Paris; he was weaning himself away from her, so he and his dazzling friends never came. She waited for the gallery to fill up, to resemble a crowded first night, but it never did. She felt like another hopeful tucked into the warrens of the building, running a gallery that needed a flashlight and compass to be found, and the long, empty days meant that business, real and imagined, was conducted mostly on the phone.

  When Christmas came, she went home to her parents in Atlanta and pretended that everything was fine. But now, away from New York, the idea of selling art after the apocalypse seemed frivolous.

  50.

  ART MAGAZINES SURVIVED—I guess subscription canceling is the last thing to think about after a disaster. My income stayed at parity, and my savings stayed intact, topped off occasionally by my intuitive parents, who had miraculously timed the sale of a dozen prime acres near Stockbridge. New York still moved, mostly on inertia, like a car coasting downhill after it had run out of gas. It turned out there was nothing to do but go on as usual, with a revival of old-fashioned love-it-or-leave-it patriotism coating everything, and the public eventually caught on that the nascent TV phrase breaking news could mean a traffic tie-up in Queens.

  I made a lunch date with Tanya Ross. I was attracted to her, and we both spoke art, which meant the conversation never ran dry: we could talk about artists, shows, openings, museums, prices, collectors, Europe, the Prado, uptown, downtown, gossip, theory, Bilbao, the Guggenheim, little-known works at the Met, the Frick, Isabella Stuart Gardner, Chuck Close, Florine Stettheimer, and sales. I met her at the restaurant at Barneys on Madison, and she insisted that we split the check. I tried, but she insisted. I couldn’t interpret if this was a good or a bad sign. Splitting the check indicates it’s not a date but also shows respect for the other person, especially since she suggested the restaurant. There was nothing datelike about our lunch, but once, she touched my hand as she made a point, and at the end of it, she invited me to a lecture sponsored by Sotheby’s. I couldn’t tell if the invite was social or professional.

  “Oh, John Richardson’s talking about his new book on Friday. Would you like to come?”

  “John Richardson?” I said. “My superhero, my god, and if it were possible, my Halloween costume.”

  Tanya laughed and looked into my eyes, pleased.

  “I’d love to come,” I said. “What’s the book? A new one?”

  ”Sacred Monsters, Sacred Munsters, something,” she said. “It’s at five and there are drinks afterwards.”

  “Drinks afterwards” made me think that Tanya was putting her toe in the water with me, and it turned out she was. She was Lacey’s opposite. She didn’t leap in ablaze. She was a tortoise to Lacey’s hare, perhaps not as effective, but her goals were less grand than Lacey’s, and a modest presence can eventually catch the eye in a powerful way.

  The lecture took place at Boulud, which Sotheby’s had bought out at tea time for the event. I felt this was the way the art world was supposed to be: sophisticated, dressed, with a British accent and raconteur’s tongue. Richardson, a real scholar with a bright pen, was a renowned biographer of Picasso; he had already completed two massive volumes of a projected four. He had escaped from the astringent clutches of Savile Row and didn’t wear the English gentleman’s uniform of a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt with a white collar, pinched gray suit, and pink tie. Instead, he looked sharp but frazzled: in other words, like an author. He enjoyed humor, especially wicked humor, and at age seventy-seven, he seemed keener and more magnetic than any person in the room. His talk, a form of worldly gossip about the fabulously interesting, was too brief, and I wanted more: I didn’t know that the Art Deco designer Jean-Michel Frank was a close relation of Anne Frank, the doomed child from Amsterdam.

  Afterward, pools of admirers collected in the dining room. I bought his book—it was actually titled Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters—and he signed it. I of course tried to impress him by quoting back his own lines to him, but what I really wanted was for him to simply tell me his writing secret. Unfortunately, I already knew it: brilliance. Perhaps I should work on that. Then Tanya brought Richardson a six p.m. Scotch, and we all were thrilled by his further stories of the naughty elite.

  I walked Tanya down Madison, asked her if she wanted to sit for a while. Yes. We stopped at Le Charlot, an authentic French bistro that made me feel authentically inferior. The waiters sped by us, curiously, since the place was nearly empty. The drinks made us loose, and we got only one-third the way through our art world, and world, topics before it was time to leave. She grabbed a cab, and I took the subway home. I thought about her a lot. There was talk of war, it was cold, but our afternoon spent in peace comforted me, and I think it comforted Tanya, too.

  51.

  IN FEBRUARY 2002, Chelsea was about to be hit with five hundred tons of steel. The Gagosian Gallery was opening a space on 24th Street, which, considering the timing, seemed like a misstep, inspiring glee in Larry’s detractors. And he was bringing in the colossal work of Richard Serra, whose favorite medium was difficulty. Fifteen-foot-high walls of rusted Corten steel had to be moved into an old paint factory, and the old paint factory had to look like a slick gallery in a matter of months. The opening was delayed because the cranes that were necessary to move the leviathan works were all occupied at Ground Zero and couldn’t be diverted for something as frivolous as an art show. But eventually, the massive leaves of corroded steel were balanced in the Gagosian Gallery like sheets of paper standing on end, and walking among them produced in the viewer equal measures of awe and nervousness.

  Lacey timed her second opening to coincide with Serra’s. She installed Latonya Walsh’s jumpy, jazzy works, and when a thousand art lovers showed up for
Serra’s opening, giving Chelsea an unexpected kick start, her place hummed along with the spillover. Pictures sold, and sold to collectors, not friends. The idea of a war in Afghanistan and luxury art purchases running along the sidewalk hand in hand struck everyone as mysterious. The war was away, far over there. Here, we were being encouraged to act normally and to understand that this conflict would affect us not at all, a fly to be brushed away. An unprecedented and feverish upswing in the art market was about to occur, one that reached beyond the insiders and the knowledgeable, which would draw the attention of stock investors and financial operators, making them turn their heads toward Chelsea.

  Betwixt the Torus and the Sphere, Richard Serra, 2001

  142 x 450 x 319 in.

  This was the opening night Lacey had imagined, not the setback of several months earlier, where Carey Harden’s work languished. Lacey put herself forth with charm and confidence, and she pushed the equally compelling Latonya Walsh forward as an intellectual, which she was, steering her into collectors’ memories as well as their sight lines.

  Patrice Claire was there for this one but guarded by a few friends, and Carey Harden was there, too. I was sorry their secret was invisible to Patrice, because at least this would have been a fact he could have digested, acted on, and used as an escape from whatever airy tethers kept him hopeful. In fact, it disturbed me that their one-nighter was so acutely unnoticeable; what did it mean for my larger world? Was every transgression capable of being so well hid? It suggested that one could connect the dots between any two people in any room and perhaps stumble onto an unknown relationship.

  Patrice left, suggesting Lacey join him for a drink later. But she never called, and he didn’t expect her to. After that night, he never saw her again.

  52.

  DURING THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, auction catalogs would swell with glamour. A reader could now see his face reflected in their glossy pages. Color foldouts heralded important paintings or tried to make unimportant paintings seem grander than they actually were. All artists, whether they deserved it or not, were, in bold letters on the page, referred to by their last names only. This made sense if the last name was Cezanne, but when contemporary catalogs announced “Jones,” the effect was silly. Somewhere, in the dark heart of the houses, it was decided that the catalogs should not just present, but should promote. A catalog could no longer be flipped through; it should demand time to spread out and absorb these sexy centerfolds. The catalog entries now had lengthy analytical essays and illuminating reproductions of other pictures, whether they related or not: a minimalist Agnes Martin might be accompanied by an illustration of the Mona Lisa, whose best connection to the picture in question might come under a TV game show category, “things that are rectangular.” The catalogs’ weight increased, and weary postmen in expensive zip codes must have hated it when auction season came around.

  These catalogs became like a semiannual stock report. Collectors scoured the estimates, then assessed the sales figures and reinsured their pictures, feeling proud that they had gotten in early. Insurance required appraisals, and Sotheby’s and Christie’s could provide them, thus gaining entrance to hitherto closed collections and coincidentally finding out where all the loot was. They started to make bold guarantees for paintings, bold enough to pry them off even the most sincere collector’s walls. It was unclear why all this market heft was occurring, but money was flowing in from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. There was, clearly, a surfeit of cash. New billionaires were being created from apparently nothing. They just suddenly were. Ten million spent here and there, even foolishly, didn’t matter.

  Because established artists were achieving out-of-reach prices, collectors turned to contemporary, and New York responded. Uptown galleries, unable to find goods at profitable prices, watched as Chelsea exploded. One could imagine the classy East Side dealers racing downtown, shedding their ties and tossing their papers of provenance into the wind, trying not only to cash in on art whose only cost was materials, but also to stay relevant.

  Lacey’s business soared. Over the past year, her gallery, quite accidentally, had become known for female artists. Besides Latonya Walsh, she had taken on Amy Arras, who produced exquisitely detailed drawings in colored pencil of warring soldiers that were remarkable both technically and conceptually.

  One Saturday, two major collectors, Ben and Belinda Boggs, wandered in and bought two pieces by Pansy Berks, who made small, glowing portraits of her drugged-out friends. They invited Lacey to attend a celebratory dinner that night, and she was not only thrilled, but obligated to attend. She taxied over to Pastis, the new in-spot.

  Belinda’s hair was golden and high, sweeping back over her forehead and held in place with lacquer and enamel red headband. The look was of a wave about to crash backward over her head. Ben had a fence of white porcelain for teeth, and his hair was styled just like Belinda’s. Their hair color matched almost exactly, which raised questions of duplicate bottle use. His skin was mottled red, sanded to a shine by one too many chemical peels.

  Lacey started to take a drink of water, but Belinda held up an open palm, indicating “halt.” She signaled the waiter, who brought over an open bottle of champagne and poured three glasses. Belinda passed Lacey a flute, toasted to her and then to her nodding husband, and said, “Congratulations, Lacey. You sold us our one thousandth painting.”

  They drank to it, and Lacey said, “Well, I wish I had met you earlier. I would have preferred to sell you your first two hundred.” Though Ben and Belinda couldn’t make jokes, they were able to sense them in the same way a blind man sensed the curb after thwacking it with his cane—they couldn’t see it, but they knew it was there—so they laughed exactly on cue.

  “We like Pansy Berks’s work because we can figure it out,” said Belinda. “That’s what makes a work appealing; I like figuring them out. Berks paints her friends when they’re high, but with colors that are unreal, too bright for the room, so she’s saying that she’s too bright for this room. And that she should change her friends. Right?”

  “Wow,” said Lacey, “right.” She cringed inside.

  “We bought a painting from Yasper,” said Belinda, “and Yasper said there was no way we could figure this one out.”

  Ben jumped in. “We had always figured out Yasper’s pictures before, but this one he said we never would. It’s one of his paradox paintings.”

  Lacey figured out, in time, that they were talking about Jasper, Jasper Johns. “Did you figure it out?”

  “No! That’s what’s so amazing. He said we couldn’t figure it out and then we couldn’t,” said Belinda.

  “I thought it was a hat; I was convinced it was a hat. But he said no,” said Ben.

  “It’s not a hat,” Belinda said.

  “It’s not a chicken, either,” accused Ben.

  Felt Suit, Joseph Beuys, 1970

  66.9 x 23.6 in.

  “I said it was a chicken and Yasper said it wasn’t,” said Belinda.

  “Do you know Joseph Beuys?” Ben said. “We bought one of his felt suits.”

  Lacey knew. Her days at Talley’s always paid off somehow. Beuys made the suits in an edition of one hundred in 1970. They were meant to hang on a wall on a coat hanger, with the pant legs hanging long, almost as though inhabited by an invisible person.

  “I love this story,” said Belinda.

  “We were having a sit-down dinner at our opening of the collection at our gallery,” said Ben. “When was this, honey?”

  “In the early nineties,” she said. “That’s when we opened our gallery.” The Boggses had a private gallery on their property in Connecticut.

  “Big, gala opening,” said Belinda.

  “I’m in a tuxedo, and let’s just say a tuxedo, white frosted cake, and a clumsy waiter don’t go well together.”

  “Oh God, this is so hilarious,” said Belinda, who did her hand thing to Ben, stopping him. “So what does he do? He takes the suit off the wall, goes into the
men’s room, and changes into it. He comes out in the felt suit and there’s applause!”

  “Most of the people there weren’t art people, mostly financial, so I was lucky. The story’s a legend now, though.”

  Lacey laughed, but she knew that Beuys was an emotional artist and that the felt suit was a serious work, probably stemming from his postwar days in Germany, days of guilt and regret.

  “The suit got wrinkled, so we bought another one. But it was worth it,” said Ben.

  “We donated the wrinkled one to a museum in Tulsa. They were happy to get it, after we explained what it was,” said Belinda. “We didn’t tell them Ben had worn it. We had it steamed.”

  Midway through dinner, Lacey could see that Ben was drunk. His head would swivel and fall toward Belinda while she ran on, and Lacey could see him try to focus. Lacey worried that someone might think that these were her parents. She excused herself to the restroom, then met them on the sidewalk. When Ben asked if she wanted a lift home in their chauffeured car, she declined, worried that his drunkenness might somehow infect the driver.

  53.

  WITH THE NATION AT WAR, I went to an art fair. Financed by ARTnews, for whom I was writing an article, I landed in Miami for the big mutha expo of galleries from all over the world, or at least countries that participated in the art market. Lacey, as a new gallery, was offered a small auxiliary space, and she took it.

  This visit was perfect for me in at least two ways. One, I got to go where the latest and greatest were gathered, sparing myself thousands of miles of travel that neither I nor the magazine could have afforded. Two, Tanya Ross and I were now going out on a date most weeks, and I was glad to have something self-important to say to her: “I’m flying to Miami for the fair.” This credited me, in my view, with special involvement and stature: I was the one ARTnews was sending. I would, by the way, have asked her out every night of the week, but I could tell she was slower-paced than I, and with each date she leaned my way a slight degree more. And she always seemed happy to see me.