Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“Highline Gallery. This is Alice.”

“Good, you’re still at your desk.”

She recognized her father’s voice.

“Hey, Papa. Can I call you back?”

Up until last year, her father had been a regular caller. Too regular, in fact. Regular enough that she’d made a point never to mention her cell phone number.

“Don’t say anything to those cocksucking reporters.”

“Excuse me. What?”

“I’ve been pulled into this game before. Don’t do it. Stay away from the vultures.”

“Wait, this mess is out there already?”

“Your mother called me. It’s on New York One as we speak.” The magic of live television. “A group like that will want to paint you as the bad guy. Same as Daily News and the Post . Cable news might be the same if it goes national. They’re all trying to outfox Fox. I’ve fallen for it, and I’ve been burned every time. You need the New Yorker . Maybe the Times . The libertarianish blogs would be good. Huffington Post would be terrific. Make it all about free speech. Theirs and yours. The more speech, the better. That’s the high ground.”

It had been a long time since she’d felt like this with her father. Symbiotic. Comfortable. Papa to the rescue.

She heard the long, solid beep again. Maybe Drew had finally picked up her messages.

“I gotta go, Papa. But thanks. Really… Highline Gallery, this is Alice.”

“Hi, Peter Morse from the Daily News . I was calling about your Hans Schuler exhibit?”

She recited a few of Schuler’s bullet points. The SELF series. Self-introspection. Mainstreaming radicalism. She left out the part where she herself had spent a good couple of weeks calling the stuff pornography.

“Sounds like it’s right out of the artist’s brochure. Between me and you, I’m looking at this guy’s stuff online. Is there really any art to be found there? The Reverend George Hardy of the Redemption of Christ Church certainly thinks not.”

“The value of art-and speech-is in the eye of the beholder and the ear of the listener. Mr. Schuler has a right to free speech, and we’ve been happy to help showcase his provocative images.” She found herself grateful for her father’s advice. “Whether people enjoy them or not, if the pictures get the community thinking and talking, we think that’s all for the bett-”

“And what about the allegations that the photographs contain pornographic images of minor children?”

“Excuse me?”

“The Redemption of Christ Church alleges that one of the models in Schuler’s series is a teenage girl. That would make the photographs in violation of criminal law, unprotected by the First Amendment.”

She immediately swiveled her chair to face one of Schuler’s photographs, the one called First . The flat chest. Thin, boyish hips. Flawless pale flesh.

“No comment.”

A lice had been hunched over her laptop so long that the small of her back ached. When she lifted her wrists to work out the kinks, she saw a crease in her skin from the pressure of her forearms against the edge of her pine breakfast table.

Despite all of her online digging, she still had no one to contact about the growing public relations disaster besides Drew Campbell, who was not answering his phone.

As a car commercial faded out on the television, she heard the familiar staccato theme music of the Channel 7 news. She reached for the remote control to crank up the volume.

A male anchor in a light blue suit with a plastered mushroom of thick black hair introduced the story. “City officials and local religious leaders are weighing in on the elusive line between art and obscenity tonight, thanks to a controversial exhibit at a new gallery in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The Highline Gallery has not yet been open a week and already has the city in an uproar.”

The screen flashed to images pulled directly from Hans Schuler’s Web site, and the audio switched to a female correspondent’s voice.

“Blood. Saliva. Nudity.” The camera tightened in around each referenced image, cropping any nudity they could not air. “Unknown artist Hans Schuler calls the photographs in his SELF series ‘a portrait in radical introspection.’ A growing chorus of critics, however, say Schuler has crossed a line into obscenity.”

Flash to a female protester. “Those pictures are disgusting. They shouldn’t be in a gallery, and they shouldn’t be on the Internet.”

“Of course, nudity in the art world is nothing new,” the correspondent announced. “The Museum of Modern Art created headlines last year with a show featuring live nude models, but the only point of contention was making sure that observers didn’t touch the art. The image that brought these protesters to Manhattan is this one, called First , which the protesters claim is an image of a minor.”

The screen cut to the gaunt man who led the protests, the caption identifying him as George Hardy, Pastor, Redemption of Christ Church. “Just looking at the picture is enough to raise questions about the age of that so-called model. But the artist won’t answer those questions. The lady at the gallery won’t come outside, won’t answer the question, and won’t assure us she’s not selling child pornography. Well, my daddy always used to tell me, where there’s smoke there’s fire. If they’ve got nothing to hide, they could put this thing to rest right now.”

Now the screen changed to a pan across the piece of art in question. The correspondent narrated. “We at Eyewitness News have blocked out almost the entire photograph because we have also been unable to confirm the age of the depicted model. Some local officials are calling for the exhibit’s removal pending verification of the model’s age.”

The multiple black bars pasted across the photograph created the impression of more tawdriness than the collage actually contained.

“The manager of the Highline Gallery declined our request for an on-camera interview, but the gallery did release a written statement: ‘The Highline Gallery promotes the work of provocative, cutting-edge artists who, like Hans Schuler, create art that makes us think, react, and sometimes even become uncomfortable with our own thoughts and reactions. We of course condemn and would never agree to display indecent depictions of minor children, but we have heard no evidence to support these disturbing allegations. Absent some articulation of a good-faith basis for the accusation, we respect the First Amendment rights of our artists.’

“For now, it sounds like the city’s mayor agrees.”

Alice wanted to believe she was managing the public relations aspect of this disaster as well as could be expected, on her own, isolated from the information that actually mattered. She had issued the written statement. She had stopped answering the gallery phone, letting all calls go to voice mail with the same statement recorded as the outgoing message. Last time she checked, she had received not only that first call she had answered from the Daily News , but also calls from the Post , Times , Sun , Observer , and a place called Empire Media.

The film cut to an image of Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepping from the backseat of a town car. “This isn’t the first time someone’s been offended by art. I support artistic freedom, and I support the First Amendment. If there is evidence that laws have been broken, we will take that evidence seriously and prosecute offenders under the law.”

“It seems the one person who isn’t commenting tonight is the artist himself. According to his Web site, Hans Schuler communicates with his followers only on the Internet so as not to taint the world’s perception of his art. Although the origin of this photograph might still be a mystery, one thing is certain: with this level of controversy, Hans Schuler isn’t likely to remain unknown for long.”