“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Back in November. I’ve been too busy with my store and with planning the art fair to do anything since. Honestly, we get more applications every year, some from people who should know better.”
A customer came into the shop right then, an obese man with a sharp voice and a lot of questions about oil paints. Betsy stood aside while Deb dealt with him.
Betsy recalled with a smile one artist who’d applied unsuccessfully for a booth at Excelsior whose art consisted of paper clips rebent into odd shapes then stuck into corks; there had been an occasional bead slid onto one, apparently to show the metal had been twisted in a fit of creativity. He hadn’t been allowed to sell at the fair. And no makers of grapevine wreaths, Styrofoam Christmas tree ornaments, and other craft items got so far as the jury. The application process weeded crafts out very firmly.
Not that there was anything wrong with Styrofoam Christmas tree ornaments; Betsy had bought several for her tree last year. But there are classes of art, a ranking that begins with “original paintings” sold in motel rooms on weekends (“nothing over fifty dollars”), stepping up to craft days at malls, then art and craft fairs, art fairs, juried art fairs, then into art galleries and art auctions, and then the really important works that go to museums and, when sold, are at places like Sotheby’s.
Betsy had been impressed at the efficiency of Deb Hart’s direction of her fair, and the committee’s work overall. At the first meeting for this year’s art fair, last November, Deb had handed out a schedule of all the meetings, each with its agenda, and to Betsy’s amazement, each meeting thereafter began on time, lasted only as long as scheduled, and completed its agenda. By the time the fair began, Betsy was ready to vote Deb into any political office she cared to run for, up to and including President of the United States. She had her cabinet already around her, experienced, hardworking, efficient.
When Deb finished with the customer, Betsy asked, “Do you know anyone I can talk to about how art works?”
Deb smiled. “How art works?”
“Yes. How does someone make money, real money, in art? I don’t mean sellers, I mean artists. How does an artist get a name? Why, for example, is Ian Masterson rich and famous, while Rob McFey wasn’t?”
“For one thing, Rob McFey did outdoor art—realistic wildlife art, which has its own admirers, but isn’t considered important. And he hadn’t been trying for as long, or as hard, as Ian. Does this have something to do with his murder?”
“I really have no idea. I’m floundering around, looking for something to take hold of. I’m so doggone ignorant about professional artists that I might be missing something.”
Deb thought, then gave an almost invisible shrug before saying, “Well, you could talk to a friend of mine. He owns a gallery in Uptown and he’s worked on a few public art committees. When do you want to talk to him?”
“Soon. Today, if possible.”
“All right, I’ll call him.”
18
At noon Betsy was shaking the hand of Peter Stephenson, a tall, affable man with naturally golden-blond hair and narrow blue eyes. They met at an Indian restaurant in the Uptown section of Minneapolis, an area rich in exotic cafés, art galleries, antique shops, and art movie houses.
The restaurant served buffet style. After they had filled their plates, Betsy, having said that she had received an invitation to serve on the board of the Modern Art Museum of Minneapolis—which was sort of true, someone had felt her out about it, but he’d lost interest before she got to tell him she was flattered but couldn’t possibly serve—said, “Deb Hart told me you’ve worked on committees that select public art. Is that the art you find in parks?”
“No, it’s the art in corporate landscapes. Typically, corporate art is part of the permit process. Corporations seeking to build or expand have to agree to spend a percentage of their investment in public art. They turn the money over to, say, Public Art Saint Paul, which actually selects the art. Often the art is by a local artist—an art instructor at Macalester University and his wife are two of the top public artists in the country. They do stone as well as welding and ironwork. But Ian Masterson was also building a name in that sort of thing himself, before he turned to smaller pieces.”
“Is Ian’s work still around the Twin Cities?”
“Yes, at Sweetwater and Minnesota Mills. He did one beside a reflecting pond that’s rather good.”
“Now I know there’s important art, like Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, and that important art isn’t the same thing as successful art, like what’s his name, Kinkaid. And there’s outdoor art, which isn’t the same thing as art that sits in a garden or beside an office building, but paintings or statues of ducks or deer. What I don’t understand is how someone becomes an ‘important’ artist. And why it sometimes—I mean some important art . . .” She paused, not wanting to say something to make him angry or feel insulted.
“Isn’t very attractive?” he said with a smile.
“Well, maybe I don’t understand it,” she confessed.
“That’s a good attitude,” he said with a nod, stirring a bit of white rice into his curry. “What makes important art is the opinion of important museums and/or galleries. There’s a certain amount of incest among them—they listen to one another’s opinions, and they speak in a language that sounds like ordinary English but has very different meanings. Too often this makes members of the general public flatly denounce what they find ugly or incomprehensible. Unfortunately”—he shrugged—“such remarks usually only display their ignorance.”
“So the art experts are correct when they discount the sneers of the ignorant—and the screams of the taxpayer who is subsidizing the museum?”
He smiled and gestured with his fork. “Frankly? Not always. Part of the problem is that beauty is near the bottom of the list of what makes a work of art important. But a bigger part is that the screaming people are often right: It’s not only that much of what is considered important is ugly, it’s that some of it isn’t really art.”
Betsy tasted her curry and immediately reached for the flatbread to soothe her burning mouth. “So how do you tell? Or perhaps more importantly, how does something awful get selected by a museum or gallery, or get put in a public place?” she asked.
“There is a short list of galleries who have a great deal of influence on who is named important. And certain museums, the Getty in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for example, and certain museums abroad, are very influential. But public art is another thing, and not the same as important art, though there can be overlap, like the Picasso in Daley Plaza, Chicago. Public art is chosen by committees, who may or may not be art experts.”
“I would have thought the committees would be composed of gallery owners or museum curators.”
He nodded at that, and took another bite. This gave him a few moments to think before he continued. “Sometimes they are. But more frequently, public art committees are composed of good, sincere people who want to be artists, who know the language, have the ego, know the names, but have little or no taste. That’s why they will buy a wonderful and costly Chihuly chandelier for an orchestra hall being restored to its Victorian Gothic splendor. They are more interested in showing that they know about Chihuly than in buying something they think will look good there, or that fits with the architectural style of the place. Other members may express concern, but don’t trust their own taste and so they go along with those who argue strongly that a certain artist or architect is a good choice.” Stevenson smiled and pointed his fork at Betsy. “And of course, there is always that member under the spell of an artist who thinks the phrase ‘art is in the eye of the beholder’ means he should give a poke in that eye.”
Betsy chuckled as she mixed a bit of chutney into her curry before taking another bite. “But that makes it sound so chancy. As if no one really knows. It’s like the Episcopal Church, of which I am a member, which teaches that
a new theory of religion is proved by whether it’s still held as true a hundred or more years after it’s proposed as dogma.”
Stevenson nodded. “I’m afraid that’s approximately correct. You might also think of it as like the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, only with nobody to be the child’s voice crying the truth. There are charlatans in this business who stand to make a lot of money if they can convince the right people that a certain artist is doing important work.”
“But why don’t the honest critics speak up?”
“For complicated reasons. Let me give you one example of how it happens—mind you, this is a made-up example, not a thinly disguised story of something I know actually happened, all right?”
“All right.”
“A woman, let’s call her Mary Smith, is extraordinarily pretty and not at all stupid, but the daughter of a farmer who didn’t finish high school, and she graduates from a consolidated high school far from a big city. She is sent to the state college, where she meets and marries John Doe, the college football star, whose father owns a small manufacturing company. The company has come up with a product that does well. John Doe goes into his father’s business and improves the product, and finds more and better ones, and so builds the company into something large and important. Mr. and Mrs. Doe become very wealthy.
“Once their only child is in school, Mary does a lot of volunteer work for garden clubs, hospitals, charities, and so forth. Her husband can be relied upon for major donations to worthy causes. Naturally, she comes to head many committees. She travels a lot and dresses expensively, buying clothes in New York and Los Angeles, even Paris and Rome. She begins to think she belongs to a ‘community’ that is much more sophisticated and stylish than her home city. She becomes bolder and more confident as time goes by, and starts appearing at concerts or plays in some outrageous outfit she presents as very high style, and gets a reputation for artistic taste. She begins to think Duluth is unsophisticated and would like to relocate to one coast or the other, but her husband is busier than ever growing his company, so they stay where they are. She cultivates friends in Duluth who admire her, who really think she is an expert in the sophisticated world of the arts. She has met movie stars, Broadway actors—she once had a conversation with Andy Warhol.
“So naturally she and a couple of her very dear friends are named to a committee that will select a design for a new museum. She persuades the committee to approach one or more famous architects for a proposal. One famous name, looking over the request, feels a certain contempt for Duluth, it being in the more distant reaches of flyover land, but he needs a new yacht or pied-à-terre in Costa del Sol, so he opens a drawer and pulls out a failed design, something found unworthy of Manhattan or San Francisco.
“Mary Doe is so thrilled to get an actual proposal from a famous name that she really talks up the design. Her friends support her. The committee nominates it as a finalist. The drawing is put in the newspaper. The public reacts badly, of course—but what did you expect from these unsophisticated rubes? An art critic for the newspaper decides to support the design, though he personally doesn’t like it. Why? First, he is in awe of the designer. Second, he is in awe of Mary Doe. Third, the public never likes anything new and avant garde, and he does not wish to be thought as backward as they. Fourth, he has about as much aesthetic sense as Mary—but even if he knows that, so what? Aesthetic beauty, remember, is passé. This design is as ugly as it is impractical, so it must be the very latest thing. Fifth, like Mary, he wants Duluth to earn a place on the map, and a museum designed by a famous architect is one way to do it.
“After his brilliant column in support, the city’s political class caves—what else can they do? They authorize the money, the committee offers the designer his price, and the designer concludes that the people in Duluth are as ignorant as he suspected. He cashes the check and doesn’t come to the groundbreaking or the opening. And so something really dreadful comes to pass, and it’s not really anyone’s fault. Also, it is everyone’s fault.”
“You make it sound inevitable.”
“It’s only nearly inevitable. That child is out there, and one day his voice will be heard. Some of us will leave town in disgrace.” He smiled again. “Others can’t wait.”
They ate in a depressed silence for a while. Then Betsy asked, “Do you know Ian Masterson?”
He said, “Are you going to ask me if he’s an important artist, a real artist, or one living in fear of the child’s asking about his lack of clothing?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Why do you want to know?”
Betsy said, “I’ve met him, and he seems very nice, and very sincere about his art. From what I’ve seen of it on his website, his latest work seems strange but powerful. He’s dating an employee of mine, who is very impressed with him. And, he seems to be very concerned about the murder of Robert McFey.”
Stephenson frowned. “McFey? I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”
“He was a wood carver. He was murdered at the Art on the Lake fair in Excelsior.”
“Oh, yes. Was that his name? An ugly thing to happen. But why is Ian Masterson concerned about the murder of this . . . rather ordinary artist?”
“Ian was a friend of Mr. McFey’s, arranging for him to get money to live on, trying to get his gallery to represent him. I understand Ian has helped other artists, which is very generous of him.”
“Artists like this McFey person or artists who actually might become important?”
Betsy held her breath for a few moments, until her temper cooled a bit. To speak dismissively of Rob McFey after the lecture he’d just given on charlatans, fakers, and children crying unheard in the wilderness disclosed a level of sophistication she hoped she never rose to.
“I don’t know. Probably mostly on the McFey level.”
“That was very generous of him.” Stephenson finished his curry with deliberation, put his fork down on his plate, and said, “All right, in my opinion, Masterson is the real thing, well on his way to becoming an important artist.”
“Is he making a lot of money with his art?”
“A fair amount, yes. But that’s not always the mark of someone who will become important. Artists whose work today sells for millions often died in obscure poverty. For artists breaking new ground, that’s practically a requirement.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Masterson started out like a lot of artists, trying different techniques, different approaches. He did some interesting work with stone and wood, then started welding metal shapes. But his early metalwork didn’t last, mostly because he did his own welding and he wasn’t that good at it. Which is probably just as well, it wasn’t very good art, either. So he decided to start over, and get into great big pieces, made of the kind of beams you build skyscrapers out of. Most of it is still around—one reason, possibly”—he smiled—“is that you hire a foundry to put the pieces together, rather than do them yourself. He liked broadly simple shapes . . .” Stephenson sketched what looked to Betsy like an A or an N in the air with his hands. “Then painted them in primary colors. Not exactly original, but he made a splash with a couple of colorful interviews. Then he announced he wanted to cross Minnesota with a row of these big sculptures and he wanted—no, he demanded—millions of dollars to do it. He got really passionate, he said that if every child in Minnesota were to contribute a dollar, it would pay for the project.” Stephenson smiled. “He said it as if he sincerely thought that the children of Minnesota would be honored to cough up a dollar apiece to cross Minnesota with these objects. He showed drawings—he called them ‘crosses,’ and since he was crossing the state with crosses, he came up with the name ‘Double Cross.’”
Betsy laughed in surprise, and Stephenson nodded significantly. He went on, “The pieces looked less like crosses than immense jacks, like from the children’s game, you know? Thirty feet high, they were. And he sounded as if he had most of the land rented and permits in place to complet
e the project, though he admitted he’d probably have trouble getting permission to cut a swath through downtown Grand Forks.
“Well, people took him seriously—some thought that it was a ridiculous waste of land and money, but he gathered a number of supporters who got angry at those who laughed at this amazing artist’s vision. And he double-crossed both of them. It turned out his art project wasn’t the giant crosses but a project to show two things: that some people will support any kind of art that ordinary people don’t understand, and that people who reflexively sneer at public art don’t understand what it’s about.”
Betsy said, “The voice of the child!”
Stephenson stared at her. “By gum!” he said and grinned. “But it was also a brilliant way to make himself known. And by the time the joke got out, he was famous. He was asked to put one of his ‘crosses across Minnesota’ in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.” Stephenson was grinning now in fond remembrance.
“But he’s doing something different now.”
Stephenson nodded. “It doesn’t take long to reach saturation with structures this size, and he very wisely got into something quite different. Much more subtle, complex, and interesting. Fantastic in execution, and a totally new direction. And because he already has a recognizable name, he’s doing extremely well.”
Betsy nodded. “I agree, it’s really different from those girders. Were you surprised?”
“Ah. Interesting question. I suppose I was. But not greatly. Artists have been known to change direction, though often it’s an evolutionary thing. But he changed rather abruptly from his original work, too. I don’t know him well, I’ve only met him a few times. He’s an interesting character, a self-seller with a great line. His big pieces were good—individual and strong. But not subtle, not . . . intellectual. This new stuff was intelligent and individual. I wasn’t blown away, because I didn’t know him well enough to have carved my opinion of his abilities in stone. But it’s nice to find a new artist who is versatile as well as good.”
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