An Object of Beauty: A Novel (12 page)

Our group hit about five galleries, in and out, in and out. There were paintings that were intentionally bad, which was an easier goal to reach than those trying to be intentionally good. One gallery had an artificial flower sprouting out of the ceiling; another gallery’s interior was coated with dense wax the color of rosé wine, in which the artist had scratched the names of all his rivals; and another gallery had a robotic machine that either saved or destroyed snapshots according to the whim of the viewer. Some of the art made Lacey laugh, some she admired, some made her turn to me and make a vomit sign with finger in mouth.

One artist with the pseudonym (it was natural to assume) of Pilot Mouse had taken over a gallery and installed… another gallery. We viewers went in one at a time, and inside was a simulation of an uptown gallery, complete with gallerygoers—really guerrilla actors—who walked around and looked at the antique store paintings on the wall. It was, I supposed, a comment on gallery going, though I don’t know what the comment was. The actors uttered phrases like “The artist is commenting on the calculation inherent in our society” or “The artist is playing with the idea of dichotomies.” These phrases were the smarty-pants version of a car dealer’s “This little baby only has eight thousand miles on it and gets fifteen miles a gallon.” But Pilot Mouse had created something intriguing: I felt a mental disorientation knowing that everything in the room was fake, including the people, especially having just come from a similar real situation uptown; and after I went back into the real world, the feeling lingered uncomfortably. Lacey reported that she had engaged one of the actors in a conversation about
a picture, during which neither of them broke character, meaning that she too had become a fake gallerygoer. Afterward, as we walked down the street, Lacey turned to me and said, “How the hell do they sell that?”

The Robert Miller Gallery had one foot in uptown and one foot in downtown, and his image was that of a reputable dealer who had a good eye and knew the market. We wandered in, ambling through a show of Alice Neel paintings, which to me could qualify as either fine art or a student’s MFA thesis show. Lacey separated from us and found herself looking through a sandwich of glass that divided the offices from the gallery. She had noticed a small fourteen-inch-square silk screen of flowers.

“Is that… ?” she said to one of the employees as he walked into the office, balancing three plastic cups of wine.

“Andy,” he said, letting the implied “Warhol” appear in Lacey’s head.

She looked at it again, thinking of the few Morandi still lifes she had just seen, thinking it was Morandi deprived of all its energy, squeezed of its juice, that it was as dead as a thing can be, thinking that it was a joyless illustration of one of earth’s wondrous things, that it could hang in a dentist’s office. After her years of looking at pictures that were working so hard, here was something that exerted no effort at all. And yet, hanging there on the wall, lit, it looked strangely like art.

We finally left Chelsea, our night of art-looking over, but Lacey was about to confront the problem of Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol died in 1987 and, surprising many historians and connoisseurs, nestled into art history like a burrowing mole. He inched up in stature, casting a shadow over the more accomplished draftsman and less controversial figure Roy Lichtenstein, and could be referred to by
his first name only, like Jesus or Madonna. As with them, the reference could be either sacred or profane. As Warhol’s prices escalated—some said by canny market manipulation from a handful of speculators—there was a strange inversion of typical market reaction. Formerly, when a masterpiece sold for an unimaginable price, as Picasso’s
Yo, Picasso
did in 1989 for nearly forty-eight million dollars, it pulled up the prices of equivalent pieces by the same artist. Then, when Van Gogh’s
Irises
sold for an equally unimaginable price in the same year, it pulled up the prices of
all
masterpieces. But when Warhol started to achieve newsworthy prices, the value of contemporary art, including art that was yet to be created, was pushed up from behind. Warhol’s presence was so
vivid, so recent, that he was identified not with the dead, but as the first nugget of gold from Sutter’s Mill. The rush was on.

Flowers,
Andy Warhol, circa 1965
48 × 48 in.

If Andy Warhol had lived to see his conquest of the art world, his response would have probably been a halfhearted “Oh wow.” His artistic legacy is rich, but his legacy as a news item is equally rich. He mastered the laconic interview, never seeming to care how he came off and never caring whether he answered the question. He possessed an indifference that said he was not trying to be popular, which had the converse result of making him popular. When asked once what he would do if he was given a million dollars to make a movie, Warhol replied, “Spend fifteen thousand on the movie and keep the rest.” This makes sense, when you remember that one of his early films was a seventy-minute continuous shot of his friend Taylor Mead’s ass.

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.”

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.”

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.

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, watched 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.