An Object of Beauty: A Novel (25 page)

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 × 450 × 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.

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 Cézanne, 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 × 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.

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.

I stayed at a fabulously shabby Art Deco hotel that was walking distance from the humongous convention center, with its seventeen entrances, vast plains of space to fill, and the worst Miami-ugly facade of bleached white stucco. Inside, though, the expo teemed with galleries, some of them so upscale that their booths were covered in brown velvet and had paneled ceilings, and some so slapdash that they could have been selling tattoos and moonshine. There were Picassos near
the front of the expo, and as you moved toward the rear, name values diminished to pinpoints. I’ve heard of museums so large that they’re easy to get lost in, but I never did. However, I did get lost in this labyrinth, and I was so befuddled for a few anxious minutes that if I had been five instead of thirty-two, I would have cried.

Lacey had taken a small space at a satellite fair, which by virtue of being labeled a satellite gave the art that was shown there extra cachet. But it put her far from the action. Spots inside the main fair had to be earned.

I walked and took notes, which gave me away as a journalist and not a buyer, but I was still welcomed as I scratched on a notepad while staring at whatever, and I would exchange smiles with the assistant or owner when I left. A few smiles were returned warmly, or perhaps provocatively, but I’m not a pickup artist. Like Tanya Ross, I prefer to talk for months.

The art fair was designed to appeal to almost any type of collector, and there were throngs of people to maneuver through. There was no way to go from start to finish without doubling back, which created an ongoing loop of déjà vu, and I was surprised to see a painting for the second time yet have no recollection of the other pictures around it. It became impossible to evaluate the artworks but easy to enjoy them; they were like a steady parade of beauty queen contestants where you find yourself saying after the fiftieth lovely one, “Next.”