Helene suggested Irish coffee, and after that we were getting on like a house on fire.
‘Have you read what Mikkel has written about our sex life?’ said Helene. ‘It’s true, he always did the same things with his hands. Why couldn’t you try something else once in a while, Mikkel?’
‘Why did you treat my dick like a gear lever?’ I said.
‘What’s your sex like together?’ said Helene.
‘Mikkel can be rough with me,’ said Diana.
‘Mikkel? Rough?’
‘He’s quite the man!’ said Diana.
Helene looked me up and down.
‘I think you two would fuck brilliantly now,’ said Diana.
‘What about us two?’ said Helene.
We walked along Esplanaden and Helene indulged in a rape fantasy involving a dark room full of unfamiliar cock.
‘Will Andreas Møller be there?’ said Diana.
There was something forced about the torches that lit up the outside of Levinsen Open. They were playing Stereo MC’s and there were quite a few people there, albeit surprisingly few I actually knew. Andreas, Nikolaj Krogh and Lisa had positioned themselves centrally in the large space and looked like delegates at a conference. I found myself not wanting to notice them. It was a do dominated by men, all off-piste, shooting party and leased cars, and laughing loudly at nothing. Diana and Helene headed straight for the dance floor.
I went and found Andreas Møller. ‘We met with the solicitor and the accountant today,’ he told me. The formal tone annoyed me.
‘The architects have given us a fantastic concept,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘Do you know the trulli in Apulia? Think conical huts strewn across the landscape.’
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said.
‘We need a board meeting. We need clear directives,’ said Andreas Møller.
Couldn’t he hear how tedious he was?
‘We’re millimetres from making this real,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
He tried to make a toast.
They were playing ‘I Love Your Smile’ by Shanice.
‘We’ll have none of your standing around looking like you’re too good for the place, if you don’t mind!’ It was Levinsen and his smile was all wrong. ‘May I give you all an eye-opener?’
He nudged us on through the oblong space and opened a sliding door.
‘Have a look round,’ said Levinsen. ‘World-class art everywhere you look.’
Great oil canvases hung from the walls, the style keenly realistic.
Scenes from an eligible residence in the Bredgade district: no furniture, light pouring in through the classic tall windows, a mattress, paraphernalia on the parquet flooring – empty sachets of heroin, tinfoil, a candle. The young man on the mattress with his back to the observer, seated in a corner with his hands in front of his face, or lying stiffly on the floor.
‘The artist is Henrik Høeg Müller. Is he good? Is he mind-blowingly good?’ said Levinsen. ‘I just sold two of the big ones to Deutsche Bank. Olafur paved the way in Berlin, now Henrik’s ripping them apart. They’re at eighty grand at the moment, but Next Love is meganice karma. Fifty thousand for you, lads. Tonight only.’
‘He’s good,’ said Nikolaj Krogh, ‘but I OD’d on disillusion in the eighties.’
‘No light without darkness,’ said Levinsen.
‘I only watch films with a happy ending,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘What say, Andreas Møller?’ said Levinsen.
‘Thanks for showing us,’ said Andreas.
They were playing ‘Sexy Motherfucker’ by Prince and the girls were swaying their hips out of time to the music.
I didn’t care for all the attention.
‘Levinsen’s finished,’ said Andreas Møller.
‘What makes you say that?’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘My family fortune is founded on bankrupts.’
I stepped aside and disappeared. Mille was at the bar.
‘I never actually thanked you,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘It was your idea for me and Nikolaj to just be friends. It’s changed everything. Did you know we’re having a baby?’
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘No, Lisa is.’
‘And you’re okay with that?’
‘Yes, and the kids are ecstatic. And you’ve got Helene back now, I see,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said.
She steered me towards the dance floor and in the midst of a group of wanton acid-jazz mothers, Helene and Diana stood kissing.
‘The waters meet,’ said Mille.
People stepped aside for me.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘We’re kissing, that’s all,’ said Helene, drunk as a student.
‘Let them kiss if they want to, leave them alone!’ said a peripheral acid-jazz mother who had once been reasonably gorgeous.
‘Mind your own business!’ I said, and the long intro of the ‘Dream Come True’ remix kicked in with its wallowing percussion.
‘I thought we were partying for Next Love?’ the acid-jazz mother said.
‘That’s not love,’ I said.
‘What kind of a faker are you?’ she said.
The next morning I was woken at quarter past eleven by someone pounding on the door. It was Søren T-shirt, with his hair combed.
‘Are you on the Rohypnols again?’ he said. ‘I’ve been standing out there the last half-hour!’
I tried to claw my way back to reality.
‘What the hell have you been doing?’ he said. ‘Your eyes are like slits.’
I tried to tell him, but was too incoherent to convey an accurate account.
‘I’ve not touched a drop of alcohol in three days,’ he said.
‘What have you been doing instead?’ I said.
‘Reading the papers, eating salad, push-ups.’
I put the kettle on.
‘It’s for our sake,’ he said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’ll never get the book finished otherwise.’
I poured the boiling water over the ground coffee beans and put a pair of mugs out on the table.
‘Everyone at Floss keeps asking and the other day it dawned on me I had to keep a clear head to tell the story properly, so I went home.’
I poured the coffee into the mugs.
‘I can’t remember when I last had three days on the wagon,’ he said. ‘I was still in flares, though. That much I do know.’
His shirt had been ironed.
‘I’ve started remembering the maddest stories. Did I ever tell you about the time I painted that Jehovah’s Witness girl’s kitchen? You’ll be rolling about. Put the tape recorder on, I can feel it all wanting out!’
‘I’ve just had a meeting with the publishers,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘They love the book about you, but they want to put it on hold.’
‘You mean it’s not going to come out?’
‘It’s been put back a bit, that’s all.’
‘That sounds exactly like when you used to send your demo tape in to some prick at a record company. There was always something in the way all of a sudden.’
He put his jacket back on.
‘Fuck this. I’ll think of you when I stick the needle in my arm.’
COPENHAGEN, SEPTEMBER 2008
Diana knew the big dinner at Minna Lund’s was going to be an ordeal and I sensed that my job was to pretend everything was all right.
It was always the first Thursday in September and the menu had remained unaltered since 1988: first escargots, then borscht and finally Spanish almond cake.
The beverage was champagne and only champagne, always a Pol Roger. Moritz told me F.P. Jac had once been shown the door for bringing his own Elephant Beer in a carrier bag.
We met up outside the gallery and strolled towards Amalievej.
Moritz was wearing a tie, I had on my
trench coat from the flat on Klerkegade and Diana was in Loden knickerbockers and mustard-coloured stockings. Moritz could easily have chosen to distance himself from the event with reference to bourgeois suffocation of the arts, but this was his tenth year running on the guest list and he had gained, as he liked to say, a more balanced view of the business community.
Minna Lund was far and away the most prominent of Danish art collectors and her annual dinner was partly a self-interested celebration of a new season commencing, and partly an opportunity to do a stocktaking of the Copenhagen art world. Those on their way down or going nowhere were absent.
She was seventy-two years old and her fortune stemmed from her father’s cannery business. Originally a graduate in librarianship, she began buying up works of the Cobra movement as a hobby in the seventies, but in May 1982 she happened to attend the opening of Kniven på Hovedet, the seminal exhibition of De Unge Vilde, and their breakthrough became hers too.
She soon developed a taste for a certain kind of contemporary art, and a reputation for being first among buyers. She visited the artists in their studios, attended lectures on semiotics at the university and was always present at any opening. When the nineties came round she embraced installation art, expanding her territory. London became a particular interest, and she discovered Britart long before any other Danish collector. She was a veteran of the Frieze Art Fair, VIP guest at Art Basel and a fixture on the invitations lists of all the important Berlin galleries.
We turned down Bülowsvej and entered that peculiar blend of musty banknotes, Greek mythology off-pat and hat-doffing in appreciation of the Wagnerian tenor that is so characteristic of the inner core of Frederiksberg.
‘Diana is one of the few domestic artists Minna Lund buys no matter what,’ said Kaspar Moritz, anticipating events. It was imperative Diana talk up her exhibition at Minna’s dinner. The tapestries had turned against her the moment she sent the drawings off to Vietnam. The exhibition was an enemy and the way Diana saw things, it was all about damage control. Apart from that, her work was going better than ever. She was producing six drawings a day and they were as inspirational as they were true to life. We had reclaimed our days together, albeit in somewhat modified fashion, insofar as I was no longer doing my writing on the bed, but shopping and cooking instead. The place smelled of meat when we woke up in the mornings and I enjoyed being the one she leaned on, and starting again each new day.
A maid in black ticked our names, another took our coats and a third offered champagne. In the hundred square metres of garden room, Minna Lund held court with magnificent froideur. As far as I could make out, Erik Goldschmidt was the only collector invited. His body language signalled remoteness, his face was straight out of an early Scorsese film, his mouth petulant in every movement.
‘May I show Mikkel and Diana some items from the collection?’ said Moritz.
Along the stairs leading to the first floor were a dozen or so drawings by David Shrigley. The first room contained some Billingham photos from Ray’s a Laugh, a disturbing and evocative Kirkeby, a Tracey Emin embroidery and stills from that video of Peter Land’s where he falls off a bar stool. In the next there was a big Gary Hume and a Chapman piggyback sculpture.
‘Are you ready?’ said Moritz.
We stepped inside a third, spacious room.
‘This is the only place in Denmark you can see a spot painting!’
Minna Lund had a tendency to overburden her wall space, but here she had accorded due reverence to a gigantic canvas comprising rows of circles in every conceivable colour.
‘Damien Hirst. She got this in 1994 for ten thousand pounds. Two years later one of the others in the series made the front page of Christie’s catalogue. His assistants have done hundreds of them since then, but this is assumed to be one of the very few he did himself. One nowhere near as good as this just went for 1.8 million pounds!’
De Unge Vilde had their own corner room and Moritz stopped at a large canvas incorporating foam rubber and tar.
‘I checked the seating plan for dinner,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the main table again. Let’s agree that your exhibition is going to be a resounding success. Now’s the time to stay the distance, Diana. Now!’
There were some two hundred guests for dinner, by all accounts dividing fairly evenly into artists and others.
The male artists preserved their integrity by coming directly from their studios in old Carhartt pants, caps and Kansas workman’s jackets, whereas their female counterparts tended to have made a plucky effort in the form of dresses, clutch bags and good shoes.
Minna Lund sat at the head of the table with Goldschmidt at her side, and since we were following Emma Gad’s guide to etiquette, Diana and I, being an unmarried couple, had been placed next to each other, with me seated to the right of the hostess. The rows of tables snaked their way through the rooms and the cheap seats at the end were noisiest. Black-clad waitresses came with aromatic escargots oozing with garlic, and Goldschmidt did his duty as dinner partner to the hostess and gave a brief speech in her honour.
‘The art season has never commenced until Minna’s borscht has been served.’
Minna Lund had no intention of wasting time.
‘Have you been adapting to the crisis, Kaspar?’
‘A crisis is what we make of it, I’d say,’ he said.
‘You’ll have to think again about that, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Goldschmidt. ‘The American pyramids are tumbling, it’s all a matter of hours.’
‘A good friend of mine claims the art market’s going to bottom out,’ I said.
Minna Lund studied me inscrutably.
‘The galleries have had their seven years of plenty,’ said Goldschmidt. ‘They’ll be doing the rounds for custom now.’
‘Some of us recall the austere eighties,’ said Minna Lund. ‘When the men were separated from the boys. How many artists of the day survived? A handful, if we’re feeling generous.’
‘You overbought, Minna,’ said Goldschmidt.
‘True,’ she said. ‘I learned a lesson. A lot of those purchases would have done better to be binned.’
Goldschmidt laughed drily.
‘What are you doing to prepare your artists for recession, Moritz?’ said Minna Lund. ‘How are you advising Diana, for instance?’
He was saved by the borscht and a prolonged chin-wag about the recipe, which the Lund family chef had developed during World War II.
I stared into the thick white tablecloth and saw Donald Crowhurst. He was loitering off the coast of Brazil, and there was nothing but sea and sky.
‘I hope we’ll see you at our opening next week,’ said Kaspar Moritz. ‘Ida-Marie has been working hard on a new track all summer and I’m pretty sure she’s going to come out guns blazing.’
‘May I be indiscreet?’ said Minna Lund.
‘Do I have a choice?’ said Kaspar Moritz.
‘How could you allow one of your artists to become an advertising display for clothing in all the leading papers?’
‘I needed the money,’ said Diana.
‘Haven’t the two of you been getting on?’ said Minna Lund. ‘I did wonder if Diana was seeking new pastures and whether her new gallery would be one with which I did not wish to be associated.’
‘It’s no secret the matter gave rise to a certain disagreement,’ said Moritz.
‘I suppose the next thing would be seeing one of the tapestries at the Bruun-Rasmussen auction house,’ said Minna Lund.
‘Would there be anything wrong with that?’ I asked.
‘Your call, Moritz,’ said Goldschmidt.
‘A gallerist will always go for optimal placement and for obvious reasons that’s out of his hands in the case of auction.’
‘Where would they go ideally?’ I asked Moritz.
‘To serious collectors like Minna or Erik, or to the museums. And then there’s the price: I take great pains to find the right price and auctioneers don’t always see things the same way
.’
‘It would be annoying, to say the least, if I were to buy a painting from Kaspar only then to see something very similar go for half the amount at Bruun-Rasmussen,’ said Goldschmidt.
‘How can you stop people putting a picture up for auction?’
‘A conscientious gallerist is selective at all levels,’ said Goldschmidt. ‘He does not serve Bull’s Blood at his vernissages, nor does he include daubers in his stable. And he makes sure his buyers are serious.’
‘A work may on occasion escape one’s control, though thankfully it doesn’t happen very often, touch wood,’ said Moritz. ‘I’ve got a little list of people not to sell to.’
‘How would you react, Diana, if one of your works were to be cast into the no-man’s-land of an auction?’ said Minna Lund.
‘It’s never going to happen,’ said Moritz. ‘We know exactly where Diana’s tapestries are placed, and they’re all hanging very happily indeed where they are.’
He indicated one of them on the wall, a classic helmsman in sou’wester, his beard spattered with semen.
‘I’ve always envied you that one, Minna,’ said Goldschmidt.
The Spanish almond cake arrived and it was quite as dry as I’d expected.
Minna Lund whispered some words to one of the waitresses. I began to look forward to escaping her clutches and gave Diana’s hand a squeeze under the table.
Moritz mustered the last of his strength and smiled at me.
I had just checked to make sure my jacket still hung from the back of my chair when the waitress came back and handed Minna Lund an envelope.
‘What have you got there?’ said Goldschmidt.
‘Bruun-Rasmussen’s latest catalogue,’ said Minna Lund.
She flicked through the pages until she found what she wanted and handed the catalogue to Moritz.
‘How would you explain this?’
Diana Kiss, Untitled, said the caption. Peter Borch-Jensen’s spunk dribbling from Diana’s cunt. Estimated price: 50,000–70,000 kroner.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Moritz.
Diana let go of my hand under the table.
‘I sold it,’ she said.
‘So I see,’ said Moritz. ‘But to whom?’
‘His name’s Kreuzmann and it was for his wife.’
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