Read Online The Genius by Jesse Kellerman - Free Book Online

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