Unknown - The Genius

An auspicious beginning.

People used to describe me as having tamed her, which was ludicrous. We simply met at the right time, and the connection proved so expedient, pleasant, and intellectually invigorating that neither of us had any reason to call it off. She is a talker; I am a nodder. We both sold, albeit in very different ways; and though we were both control freaks, we maintained our own private lives, which prevented us from clashing. And although she would never admit it, I think the Muller name plucked a chord of awe inside her. In the pantheon of Old American Money, I might not rate very high, but to Marilyn “My Father was an Industrial Mechanic” Wooten, I must have looked like John Jacob Astor.

It also helped that we had no expectations of fidelity. That was the unspoken rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

“LEAVE IT TO YOU,” she said, forking her roasted-pepper-and-goat-cheese napoleon, “to find the one who can actually draw. I thought that was the whole point of outsider art, that it looked like shit.”

“Who said it was outsider art.”

“You have to call it something.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because people like their hands held.”

“I think I’ll let them dangle a bit.”

“You’re really lousing this up, you know that?”

“I’m not doing it for the money.”

” ‘I’m not doing it for the money.’ ” She sat back, wiping her mouth. Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her

food will be taken away, and when she pauses it’s not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself. “You’ll never get over your love of pretty things, Ethan. That’s your problem.”

“I don’t see why that’s such a problem. And they’re not pretty. Have you even seen them?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“They’re not pretty.”

“They’re like something Francis Bacon would draw in detention. Don’t listen to me, darlin. I’m just jealous of your margins. Mine, please?”

I handed her the rest of my salad.

“Thank you.” She dug in. “I hear Kristjana is on the warpath.”

“I had to cut her loose. I felt bad about it, but—”

“Don’t. I don’t blame you. I had her for a time, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“I discovered her,” she said.

This I knew to be a lie. “Is that a fact.”

She shrugged. “In a way. I discovered her at Geoffrey Mann’s. He wasn’t doing anything for her. So I rediscovered her.”

“Stole her, you mean.”

“Is it stealing if you want to give it back?”

“I offered to reschedule her show, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“She’ll live. Someone’ll pick her up, they always do. She called me, you know.”

“Did she.”

“Mm. Thank you,” she said, accepting her duck from the waiter. “She pitched her project to me. With the ice? I told her no thank you. I’m not turning off the air-conditioning in my gallery so she can stroke herself off about the environment. Please. Make me something I can sell.”

“She used to be a good painter.”

“They all start out that way,” she said. “Hungry. Then they get a couple of suck-up reviews and next thing they start thinking if they shit in a can it’ll be brilliant.”

I pointed out that Piero Manzoni had, in fact, sold cans of his own shit.

“It was original then,” she said. “Forty years ago. Now it just smells bad.”

I DID CONCEDE MARILYN’S BASIC POINT: Victor Cracke’s art didn’t fit into any clear category, which made my role in its success—or failure— that much stronger. Part of a dealer’s skill, his creativity, lies in surrounding a piece with the correct context. Everybody likes to be able to talk about their art to their friends, to be knowledgeable. In this way one can rationalize spending half a million dollars on crayon and string.

In theory, I had the easiest job imaginable: I could make up whatever I wanted. Nobody would contradict me if I decided to make Victor a dishwasher, a professional gymnast, a retired assassin. Ultimately, though, I decided that the most compelling narrative was none at all: Victor Cracke, cipher. Let people write the story themselves, and they will insert whatever hopes, dreams, fears, and lusts they want. The piece becomes a Rorschach test. All art of value achieves this to a certain extent, but I suspected that the scale of Victor’s piece, its hallucinogenic totality, would make for a lot of audience countertransference. That, or a boatload of confusion.

I thus found myself answering a lot of opening-night questions the same way.

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t really know.”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I know that.”

Or:

“What do you think?”

At an opening, you can identify the novice by his interest in the work. Gallery people don’t bother to look at all. They’re there for the wine and crackers, and to talk about who’s up or down this week.

“Smashing,” Marilyn said, tipping back her plastic cup.

“Thank you.”

“I brought you a present. Did you notice?”

“Where.”

“There, silly.” She nosed at a tall, handsome man in a slim-cut suit.

I looked at her with surprise. Kevin Hollister was a good friend of Marilyn’s, her ex-husband’s Groton roommate. Quarterbacking Harvard to three Ivy League titles earned him a spectacularly cushy banking job right out of school, and ever since then he’s been on the rise. He lives, you might say, comfortably. His hedge fund is named Downfield.

Recently he had turned his attention from shorting Eastern European currencies to art, a typical Culture Climber, to whom a canvas was little more than an expensive ticket to an exclusive party. I am forever astonished at how men with money and brains—men who control world markets, run major corporations, have the ear of politicians—become dribbling imbeciles in front of a painting. Not knowing where to begin, they run to the nearest source of guidance, no matter how biased or mercenary.

In a spectacular display of poor judgment, Hollister had hired Marilyn as a consultant, giving her what amounted to a private tap on his bank account. Needless to say, she had sold him work exclusively by artists she represented, barking at anyone who tried to step onto her territory. Earlier she had told me, “He doesn’t appreciate that a world-class collection is the product of thought and patience, and cannot be created in one fell swoop. But I’m happy to help him try.”

I’d met him once or twice, but we’d never spoken for more than a few minutes, and never about art. That Marilyn had brought him tonight meant one of two things: she thought Victor Cracke was good, or she considered me and my art no threat at all to her monopoly.

“I’m expanding his horizons,” she said. She winked at me and went to take Hollister’s arm.

I worked the room all evening, chatting up the usual suspects. Jocko Steinberger, who looked as though he hadn’t shaved since his own opening the previous December, came and spent the whole evening staring cata-tonically at one drawing. We had a surprise visit from Etienne St. Mauritz, who, along with Castelli and Emmerich, used to be one of the premier

American dealers. Now he was old, a liver-spotted demigod being wheeled around by a woman in a long fur coat and Christian Louboutin heels. He thought the work excellent and told me so.

Nat brought his boyfriend and they hit it off talking to another dealer named Glenn Steiger, a former assistant to Ken Noland with a dirty mouth and an arsenal of dirty stories. As I passed them I overheard him saying, “… tried to buy a canvas from me with forty-eight thousand dollars … in one-dollar bills … that fucking reeked of marijuana … fucking playground money …”