Meanwhile, the museum set to the tasks of choosing works from its own collection and requesting loans of seminal works from other museums around the country. A month before the exhibition was to open, the museum closed its doors entirely and renovated all its galleries. Curators prepared essays and tour booklets and hired docents to lead museumgoers through the show. Advertisements were placed which stressed the importance of the conceptual artist and her mysterious fin-de-siècle masterwork.
With a couple of weeks left before the opening of the exhibition, preparators began to hang the works in their respective galleries. The gallery devoted to the conceptual artist, however, remained empty, and she made no appearance at the museum. Curators, fearing she was ill or had (as she was known to occasionally do) suffered a nervous breakdown, left repeated messages on her answering machine. When she didn’t respond, the curators visited her studio. She was never in.
One scant week before the opening, the curators received a call from a lawyer representing the conceptual artist. He arranged a meeting with museum officials, during which he revealed that the artist would not install her great work unless a new contract was drawn up and new obligations fulfilled. These included a promise of certain foods at the opening party, a number of unusual and expensive material gifts, a poem composed in her honor to be read at an unveiling ceremony, and a substantial increase in the amount of her commission. While the museum did not wish to cave in to her demands, they nonetheless recognized the importance of her piece to their exhibition, and swallowed their pride.
On the day before the show was to open, the conceptual artist walked into the gallery reserved for her, and thumbtacked to its far wall signed and executed copies of her original contract, her new contract, and a large color photograph of her lawyer. Then she set a metal salad bowl on the floor, filled it with twenty-dollar bills in the amount of her “raise” and burned them to ashes.
The piece drew thousands of eager museumgoers who had read about the contractual haggling and wanted to see what the fuss had been about. Reactions were strong but mixed. Some said the piece confirmed their opinion that contemporary art was an elaborate scam designed to part pretentious fools from their money. Others claimed the piece confirmed their opinion that contemporary art was once vital and incisive, but had since “sold out” to commercial interests. This latter group divided into two camps: those who believed that the new work was a perfect example of such a sellout, and those who believed that the new work was a brilliant condemnation of those who had sold out.
At any rate, when the exhibition closed, the museum bought the controversial piece for its permanent collection, paying an undisclosed sum far above and beyond the amount originally stipulated for the work’s execution.
Two Professors
I know two professors of literature who were good friends until one night, at a party, when they entered into a debate about the proper spelling of a certain word. One argued for “grey,” the other for “gray.” For some minutes the debate was lively and interesting. The professor who preferred “grey” believed that the word connoted a faded elegance, a kind of obsolete stateliness, which we in America commonly associate with the British; thus the British spelling, with an “e,” was more appropriate. The other professor said that he could not argue with those connotations, but believed that American writers should take a stand and recontextualize the word; “gray,” he insisted, was the color of the Midwestern sky, of clapboards and asphalt, and the long “a” sound in this country, less genteel and more abrasive than its British counterpart, is better expressed by the letter “a,” and not the letter “e.” It is worth noting that the professor who argued for “grey” was a native of the U.S., while the one who preferred “gray” had moved here from London some decades before.
As it happened, the issue was not resolved, and the debate continued for hours after everyone else had lost interest. The professors said several terrible things to one another and have not spoken in the years since the party. I have remained in contact with both, and have noticed in their correspondence that the one who previously supported “grey” has switched to “gray,” and the one who liked “gray” has gone over to “grey.” When I asked them about this, the first explained that an extended stay in the Midwest, and exposure to its patterns of speech, convinced him of his opponent’s point of view, while the second told me that his campaign to Americanize the word now seemed foolish and proud, and he was content to return to his lexicographical roots. Despite the switch, however, of which both are quite aware, the professors remain unwilling to speak to one another, though they teach in the same university department and are forced to see each other almost daily.
As for me, I now try to avoid the word entirely, and if I must describe an object in writing I tend to identify it by features other than its color.
The Hollow Door
A woman I know, a poet, moved to an apartment in a large city several years ago, in the hope that the new environment would bring a fresh perspective to her life, her enthusiasm for which had been flagging for some time. She dedicated herself to her work, and made a concerted effort, through increased correspondence, to strengthen her bonds with distant friends.
Unfortunately, things did not go her way. Her long, intimate letters went unanswered, the magazines she sent her work to never seemed to respond, and she fell into a depression. The daily mail disappointed her deeply, and often drove her to tears. She became absent-minded and failed to maintain even the simplest household responsibilities: bills went unpaid, utilities were turned off, and her refrigerator always stood empty of food.
She went on to seek solace in expensive therapy, and at long last, when her money was gone, decided to return to small town life. While preparing to move, she went to pick up the mail one day and noticed the corner of an envelope poking out of the slot. Closer examination revealed that the door was hollow, and that a letter had fallen into the open space. Extracting the letter, she discovered that the hollow extended deep into the door, and was filled with unopened mail.
In a panic, she tore the door apart with a hammer, and dozens of letters spilled onto the floor. Among them were the utility bills she never paid, generous replies to her letters, and countless responses from poetry magazines, many of them acceptances on which she had unwittingly defaulted. She spent the next day and a half on the telephone, trying to set things right with her friends and editors, and left the city not long afterward. She reports that her life is much better these days, though she still regrets not having found another way to remove the hidden mail; her landlord refused to return her security deposit (nearly eight hundred dollars) owing to the damage done to her door. She often thinks about the money and fantasizes about what she might spend it on, were it suddenly returned to her.
Impostor
A composer of film scores and musical theater found himself, despite enormous popular acclaim, smugly reviled by the critics of the day, for whose respect he nonetheless perennially longed. When he died, a biographer discovered among his papers a collection of pieces, dated in the composer’s youth, that seemed to presage the difficult compositional style prevalent among other composers at the time of his death. When published, these pieces caused a great stir, as they appeared to have been dashed off and quickly abandoned for the accessible music the composer would become known and loved for.
The newly discovered music was performed to great acclaim, and, in the ensuing years, was much analyzed in academic circles, with an enthusiasm and gravity usually reserved for the greatest artists of the century. Furthermore, the more accessible works were now seen in the light of the prescient early works, and were celebrated for the very qualities that had before been the subject of such derision, since these qualities now represented a reaction against, as opposed to an ignorance of, current ideas.
For ten years the composer’s reputation grew, until a critic at our local university, who had never been convinced of the authenticity of the early works, commissione
d a scientific inquiry into the scores that proved they were written just before the composer died, and not in his youth, as the dates had suggested. The composer had apparently spent his declining years generating pastiches of contemporary music, then back-dated the manuscripts in order to deceive posterity.
The critic publicized his findings and wrote a revisionist biography of the composer that again reversed scholarly opinion of his work, and brought the critic his own great acclaim. It wasn’t until just recently, however, that the critic’s ex-lover, a former graduate student of his whom he had spurned in favor of a younger, more voluptuous and worshipful graduate student, published a paper proving that the critic’s scientific inquiry was itself faked. The paper restored the composer’s reputation, sullied the critic’s, and propelled the ex-lover to sudden fame in academic circles. Furthermore it has resulted in the creation of an Academic Studies department at our university, dedicated to the study of study.
An investigation is apparently under way into the integrity of the ex-lover’s research. The results are due to be published any day.
Mikeworld
A small South Pacific island nation of half a million, which had been colonized in the nineteenth century, suffered for many years under Spanish rule, and finally gained its independence by referendum in the late 1950s, not long ago founded its first university. Because of its size and relative poverty, the island was home to few trained academic scholars, and so when it came time for the government to select a university president, it chose a self-made intellectual and hero of the nationalist resistance effort. This man, a serious, imposing figure in his late fifties, read many hundreds of books in preparation for his job, and in addition to running the administration of the college taught a number of classes as well.
Meanwhile, the university here in our town mounted a conference on higher education in the developing world, and invited to it, among other diverse international education officials, the president of the island nation’s university. He left his home with great excitement, flattered to be asked to visit a prestigious American institution, and resolved to return with new ideas for the improvement of his school.
It happens that our town is home to an interesting piece of public sculpture: a scale model of the solar system. At the city center stands a marble pedestal marked with an image of the sun that has been scaled down to the size of a basketball, and within a block are pedestals depicting Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, mere specks in comparison. A few blocks away is Saturn, and several blocks more, Jupiter; the outer planets stand more than a mile from the sun.
By chance, our university’s education conference coincided with an exhibition of final projects from its fine arts program, and one of these final projects, the brainchild of a goateed conceptual artist named Mike, was the construction of an additional marble pedestal. The pedestal, which the artist and his friends had installed on a patch of sidewalk somewhere between Saturn and Jupiter, documented a ringed gas giant called Mikeworld, upon which, according to an attached plaque, lived a race of sentient aliens whose enormous bodies were composed primarily of methane gas. The pedestal was identical in appearance to the ones originally commissioned by the city, and was generally thought to be very funny, except by those city officials who would eventually have to remove it.
On a break from the education conference, the university president from the island nation took to strolling about the town, and discovered, as many visitors do, the scale model of the solar system. Delighted, he resolved to walk the length of the sculpture, and inevitably he came upon the Mikeworld pedestal.
The president was not a stupid man, and his understandable initial reaction was disbelief. But because of our university’s excellent reputation, and because his home island had had neither the time nor inclination to develop its own conceptual art, which he would have been hard pressed, given his cultural predisposition, to comprehend, the president decided to believe the sculpture, and returned to his country with the information that another planet existed, and it was inhabited by sentient beings.
It was not long before this information had spawned an academic mini-department of its own, and within a few years a team of astronomers on the island discovered a celestial body they thought might be Mikeworld. It was photographed and written about, and a web site devoted to it soon appeared on the Internet, where conspiracy theorists, ufologists and new age practitioners of all stripes rallied around it, and where I first encountered the blurry photographs. A hypothesis emerged about the origins of the giant gas people: they were said to be pagan gods, in retreat from the heretical techno-avarice of earth.
Eventually all this got back to Mike, the student artist, who has graduated and now works at a restaurant I visit from time to time. The pedestal has long since been removed at taxpayer expense and destroyed. When I asked him what he thinks of all the attention, he told me that he has fielded thousands of collect calls from all over the world, and though he has moved repeatedly and regularly changes his number, he is inundated daily with requests for advice, direction and money, and about once a month he receives a death threat. The hysteria surrounding Mikeworld has ruined his life, and he wishes he had never thought it up.
However, another acquaintance, an employee of the department of public works, has no sympathy for Mike, and in fact insists that the artist, having played God, has gotten exactly what was coming to him.
Meteorite
For some weeks, talk in our town focused on a meteorite that plunged to earth one morning, interrupting the prayers of the devoutly religious family into whose yard it fell. The meteorite was nearly fourteen inches in diameter, making it an unusually large specimen to have been found intact, and immediately drew the attention of our university’s astronomy department. One scientist in particular, who specialized in meteors, comets and asteroids, seemed especially eager to examine the meteorite, and began negotiations with the family to acquire it for the university.
But the family was unwilling to relinquish the object, despite the small fortune the university was offering to pay for it. It seemed that they assigned to the meteorite some religious significance, and had begun to incorporate it into their devotional activities. Through it, they claimed, they were better able to speak to God.
At last the university gave up, and for days little was heard about the meteorite. But a week later, upon returning from church, the family called the police to report it missing. Within hours the meteorite was found in the scientist’s lab, where he had begun to subject it to numerous tests. He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a short prison term.
Remarkably, the scientist’s defense consisted of his contention that, despite legal precedents to the contrary, the family did not own the meteorite, that in fact it was in the public domain and had been stolen from the town by the family.
Furthermore, he argued, the meteorite was being unfairly subjected to religious beliefs it did not itself hold; it was inherently an object of scientific inquiry, and its belief system was that of science alone. This defense was presented without the assistance of a lawyer.
The university, appalled by the scientist’s actions and his assignation of a belief system to a meteorite, did not renew his contract for the following academic year. The family, on the other hand, has abandoned their faith and begun a new religion based on the meteorite’s status as a religious artifact given to them by God. They have moved out to the country and are said to have attracted several hundred worshipers to their compound.
Lefties
A local professor was honored, and a national newspaper ran a photograph of him writing on a chalkboard before a classroom full of students. Not long afterward, the professor was asked to speak at the annual meeting of a club for left-handed persons. In his letter, the club’s president explained that he had seen the photo and noticed the professor’s left-handedness; he believed the professor was a credit to “lefties” and would make an inspiring and enlightening guest. Included with the letter was a bo
oklet listing the accomplishments of left-handed people, photocopied articles asserting the creative and intellectual superiority of lefties, and a catalog of whimsical products for the left-handed, including special coffee mugs, pens, and eating utensils with pro-left-hand messages printed on them.
The professor agreed to speak to the club, and was given a large honorarium, free transportation, and a lavish hotel suite complete with mini-gym and sauna. When at last he stood before the assembled lefties, he thanked them for their invitation, then proceeded to berate them for their smugness and stupidity. He pointed out that he was, in fact, right-handed, and only appeared left-handed in the photo because the newspaper had reversed the negative; if they had looked a little more closely, he said, they would have noticed that the writing on the chalkboard was backward. He told them that they should honor others for their achievements and not their genetic circumstances, and then, only minutes into his speech, stepped down from the dais and caught a cab to the airport.
When years later the professor lost his right arm in a highway crash, he was unsurprised to receive a flood of congratulatory letters, and the first in an endless stream of free “lefty” gift items that have appeared almost daily on his doorstep ever since. Far from being angry, he views this unfortunate turn of events as a kind of poetic justice, and even tried to apologize to the lefties’ club in a kind letter to its president. However, his speech had cut too deeply, and the lefties continue to bombard him with junk.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 10
