by Jonathan Dee
In the tiny anteroom just behind the auditorium stage they could hear the swelling murmur of the crowd. The event, the dean said proudly, was sold out. Balding, in a black suit which he picked at so unfamiliarly it might as well still have had the price tag on it, the dean sat in a folding chair, smiling affably, trying to keep his knees from touching Osbourne’s or John’s. He did ask Osbourne, hopefully, if he would like to hear his introduction in advance, just to make sure there were no inaccuracies, nothing objectionable, unfortunately there was no written text to show him, it was all in the dean’s head. Osbourne smiled and said he was sure it would be fine.
It was fine; John and Mal stood in the wings and listened to it. The dean went on a bit long, working in Tocqueville and McLuhan and Jacques Ellul and Sonic Youth, but it was all quite thoughtful. Then Osbourne walked out to the podium, clapping the dean on the shoulder as they passed, and waited for the applause to die down.
It didn’t die down for quite some time.
“Let me tell you something about myself,” Osbourne began. “What I do is not advertising. Advertising is all about moving product. Or it’s all about envy. It’s all about sex, about lust, about instant gratification. Advertising is the beast. Well, I came here tonight, the first public appearance I’ve made in about seven years, because I have news to bring to you. The beast is dead. I have killed it.”
John couldn’t see Osbourne’s face. A shifting took place throughout the hall, making a rolling sound like something you might hear at night if you lived near the sea; then gradually, thrillingly, it turned into more applause.
“The good news is that advertising has left behind the husk of its form – as mighty an apparatus as the world has ever seen – and as with any form the question of content is wide open. Limited only by the imagination of artists. And yes, I said artists, because the idea that the commercial world may function only as a place where real artists, quote unquote, come to whore themselves – this is an idea upon which everyone agrees in advance, a ready-made idea, an established idea. Hence, a dead idea.
“It comes joined at the hip to another dead idea, namely that art which reaches the greatest possible audience is by definition bad art, because badness, by which is meant simplicity, must be the means of reaching that broad audience. This, to speak plainly, is bullshit. The work that we produce at our new institution, Palladio – great work, important work, from an artistic standpoint alone – what should we do, put it in a drawer, take it out and show it to our friends when they come over? No. As an artist I believe that I have something to say, and if I have something to say I use the greatest means of expression available to me. This seems obvious, to me. And yet we are vilified for it. The reason our art reaches millions and millions of people is because that’s the nature of the form. No matter how good or bad it is, how simple or how obscure, it will enter the consciousness of many, many millions of people. All the elitist defenders of the notion of high art – well, you’d think this would be a cause for them to flock to advertising, say hosannas in praise of it. ‘What a wonderful thing is advertising. A haven for great artists, where they don’t have to struggle, where they can say what they please with a built-in audience of millions.’ You don’t need me to tell you that this isn’t happening. The great thinkers of the academy haven’t figured it out. The business community hasn’t figured it out.
“I have figured it out.”
Laughter: for the first time in his life, John experienced the intoxicating effect produced by the laughter of a living, breathing, present audience. He took a step and tried to look out across the stage, to see some of the faces of those who had gathered to hear Osbourne’s address. But the stage lights were right in his face; he couldn’t make out anything past about the second row.
“I worked for years in the ad world, all through the seventies and eighties. I rose to the top of that profession. And I’ll tell you, the more successful and respectable I became, the more I was treated like a star, told I was an innovator, the more disgusted I became with myself. I knew that what I was doing was really just a kind of endless theme-and-variations, and that theme was the status quo. There was nothing new about it. Believe me, there was a period of a few years there where I considered just getting out of the ad business entirely. And yet, even when things were at their worst, I knew somehow, in my heart of hearts as they say, that advertising wasn’t failing me. I was failing it. There was an enormous, an unprecedented sort of potential there, if only I could figure out a way to get at it.”
Osbourne paused to sip from a glass of water. The hall was silent, and John, without realizing it, was holding his breath along with them until his boss started speaking again.
“I was also an art collector for many years,” Mal said. “Not out of a profit motive: I mean, the motive was for the artists to profit. I loved art, contemporary art, and if I was in a position to help subsidize these struggling young artists, to help them financially and to help them find a wider audience, then that’s what I wanted to do. But what happened was, the two sides of my life began to come together, philosophically, in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The art I saw was increasingly … well, I don’t want to say bad, it wasn’t bad. It was frustrated. It was hobbled by a sense of its own irrelevance, by a sense of the impossibility of mattering, of doing anything new. They were working for each other, really. It became totally, irremediably self-referential, and the basic paradox was that in order to gain acceptance as an artist, you had to make sure that you were working with precisely that small, knowing, insular, incestuous, ever-shrinking audience in mind. No wonder the artists were frustrated! To do what they were born to do, they had to enter a virtual monkhood, aesthetically speaking. They had to forgo any possibility of really mattering.
“At the same time, in my role as a partner and creative director at a major, quote-unquote cutting-edge advertising agency, I saw a number of highly gifted, ambitious, intelligent artists, artists with, in some cases at least, all the good intentions in the world and a lot to offer the world, I saw them doing work that was just awful, mind-numbing, destructive, reactionary. And they were doing it for a staggering, massive, global audience – an audience so starved for a great popular art that these hacks were hailed as geniuses. Okay, not hacks, they weren’t hacks at all, but their work was hackwork, that’s the point. They were locked into a certain intellectual framework. Nothing they did was at all innovative, everything they fobbed off as new was in fact borrowed, tested, safe. And safety is the death knell for art. And these guys thought they were rebels. So I got to thinking if there wasn’t some way this seeming cultural wall, separating art and its audience, couldn’t be breached somehow. I went looking for artists who I thought would be open to this radical idea as a kind of unconventional avenue to fulfilling their own vision.
“We live in a period when the avant-garde has ceased to exist, where nothing shocks any longer because we’ve seen, done, violated, overthrown it all. What I discovered is that in order to find that avant-garde power again, you have to move into, paradoxically, the most banal of all media. The one place left, it seems, where certain kinds of ideas are forbidden to be expressed. Where the two partners in communication, called editorial and advertising, cling to the Enlightenment-age fiction of their irreconcilability with one another. It’s pretty late in the game, right now, if you’re an artist; if you want to do something interesting, something new, you have to forget books, forget painting, sculpture, theater, journalism, movies. You have to take on advertising. You have to enclose its incredible powers of destruction.
“In the year and a half that Palladio has been in operation, that is what we have tried to do. We have launched a revolution. We have blown up advertising. We have broken open the frame – aesthetically, and, to a lesser degree, politically. Still, this revolution is a modest one. I feel we are just starting to do what Modernism did, in its revolution – that is, launch the debate.
“Every client of ours – every client – has see
n an upsurge in sales as a result of our work. I don’t care. Our work will continue even if that circumstance should change. Our whole aim in starting Palladio was to remove the element of cynicism from advertising. And yet what are we most often accused of? Cynicism.
“Actually, the complaint I hear most often may be one most of you are not privy to, because it comes from within the ad business itself. Constantly, I overhear this kind of professional sniping, this scoffing, to the effect that when you see a Palladio ad, you have no idea what it’s selling. This ‘complaint’ is in fact, to me, the highest possible compliment. Because advertisements have nothing to do with the quality or value or character of the product they advertise, and haven’t for a long, long time. That relationship is a fossil. The thing to concentrate on, ladies and gentlemen, is the quality of the messages these products – which is to say, their makers – agree to propagate. How one can maintain one’s cynicism in the face of the enthusiastic public response to this idea is simply beyond me.
“What’s next for us? Well, we’re looking for more outlets, by which I mean different sorts of outlets, places where you don’t expect subversive messages. I mean, TV, radio, magazines, billboards, it’s so stale, really, so limiting. We have recently begun discussing, for instance, an initiative to develop educational materials for schools. Of course we will be damned for this effort before we even begin. But these materials will contain no product references of any sort. Let me tell you, the truly dangerous people are those who insist that there is no such thing as doing good in the world, on a broad scale, without some ulterior motive. And anyway, what of it – the ulterior motive? What exactly is wrong with the desire to sell? If no one’s freedoms or rights are violated in doing so? But the question is finally irrelevant. What is important is that we have proven that advertising, our age’s greatest form of expression – whose worldwide annual budget, incidentally, is greater than that for public education – can communicate something greater than the masquerades of happiness, the fables of envy and lust and instant gratification, that form the whole worn fabric of Western life, Western dreams. What meaning does money have, when balanced against the good that’s done? Who ever said that changing the world ought to be a low-paying job?”
The hall was motionless. Osbourne, his jaw set in a hard line, took out a red silk handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his head.
“I believe,” he said, “we have time for a few questions.”
JOHN WAS LATE getting to work because of an appointment he was too embarrassed to reveal, to his assistant or even to Elaine – a trip to the Porsche dealership in Charlottesville. For a while he had saved his paychecks, even as the amount on them leapt by fantastic margins every other month or so. But after seeing Osbourne’s reception at NYU, John was starting to shake the nagging feeling that all their success might be some evanescent cultural bubble. He felt entitled to a few indulgences.
His secretary, Tasha, was on the phone when he walked past, so he waved and went into his own office next door. After a minute he buzzed her on the intercom, to see what messages had come while he was out. No answer. He buzzed again, waited a few moments, then got up and went to the door of her office; from her desk chair she glanced up at him, surprised. She appeared to be reading a magazine.
“Didn’t you hear me buzzing?”
“No,” Tasha said, and rolled her eyes. “It must be broken again. I’ll call Benjamin.”
“What do I have today?”
“The movie people, in about twenty minutes.”
The movie people. They were there to see Mal – in fact, they were Mal’s guests – but John suspected their motives, and in any case it was a rule of thumb around there that no one saw Mal during the business day without going through John first. John also happened to know that Mal wasn’t in the house at the moment, having gone off for a recreational drive, a pastime that sometimes kept him away for hours.
In the meantime, John shut his door and looked over two items he needed to discuss with Mal when they next caught up with one another. The first was how to handle a feeler that had come in from the Committee to Reelect the President. The President was said to be a great admirer of Osbourne’s work, or at any rate the principle behind it – the banishment of cynicism from public discourse, and the attraction of the culture’s greatest artists to its most accessible of arts. And Osbourne was unlikely to be able to resist an opportunity to influence public discourse on that kind of a scale. The potential problem, as John saw it, was that the President’s campaign staff was virtually certain to want some say when it came to the question of content – an anathemous notion around there, one that was off the table from the beginning when it came to other clients. As for the question of whether or not Osbourne was a supporter of the President, John hadn’t the slightest idea. Mal never discussed such things.
The second item came to John in the form of a newspaper clipping from the Denver Post. In the accompanying photo, what had become one of Palladio’s most familiar images, a text-only billboard (it ran in magazines and, as a still image, on TV as well) with the words “The End Is Near” written on a white background, had been defaced by spray paint with green dollar signs, a stenciled American flag (also all green), and the addition of two letters, so that the text – originally Elaine’s design, as it happened – read “The Trend Is Near”. That this wasn’t a routine bit of vandalism was testified to by the fact that it had been repeated in different cities across the West, with a good deal of attendant press coverage. A group calling itself Culture Trust had taken credit for what they termed, as the Post unfortunately echoed, a “guerrilla action.” Two of its members had been arrested in a similar act in Spokane, vandalizing with green spray paint work hanging in a gallery show called “The Palladio Phenomenon,” and were demanding a jury trial rather than pay a simple fine. The wise course, John felt, would have been to ignore all this; yet he felt a sad premonition that this was not the course Osbourne would favor. Still, you had to tell him everything. God forbid he should find out through some other source.
There was a knock, and Tasha opened the door just enough to stick her head in. “Intercom’s still broken,” she whispered apologetically. “The movie people are here.”
“How many movie people are there, exactly?”
“Just two. The director and a woman he claims is his assistant.”
“Claims?”
Tasha shrugged her shoulders. “Girlfriend, assistant, whatever.”
“Okay,” John said. “Send them in.”
She pulled the door shut. John pushed his chair back from his desk, and ran his hands through his hair. They were only coming in to talk; still, they were the movie people, and that made him more conscious of being seen. Another knock.
“Yes?” he said, and the door opened again.
2
I STOOD UP behind my desk as they walked in. Through Tasha’s introductions I remained standing, my fingertips splayed out and pressing down on the desk, and honestly that’s because I thought there was a real possibility I would fall down.
And this is his assistant, Tasha said, Molly Howe. Molly, John Wheelwright.
We shook hands, that’s what kills me. We didn’t let on right away what was happening. A door that has opened eventlessly a million times opens one day to reveal Molly standing on the other side: there was a time in my life, believe it or not, when such a moment wouldn’t have found me unprepared, when I burned with the unreasonable belief that just such a thing would happen, that she would simply turn up one day, as inexplicably as she’d vanished. But that was years ago. On this day, my astonishment was profound. I put out my hand; Molly reached across the desk and held it for just a second; then our arms fell back to our sides and we went on staring into the mirror of our own disbelief.
It didn’t last but a second, though; maybe it was the touch, the physical touch, that snapped me out of it.
Actually, I said, smiling a little, we’ve met before.
No kidding?
I heard Dex say. I don’t think I’d so much as looked at him yet.
Molly said nothing. We had a secret; but if I thought we were going to share the private gravity of it somehow, even silently, I was mistaken. She did not return my smile; in fact she seemed immobilized by her amazement, fighting it for control of herself, like someone who comes face to face with a dead person, or a bear, or the Virgin Mary. Her eyes seemed to dilate as I stared at her. She was afraid of me. It was unsettling to see.
Not that I want to put it all on her; I wasn’t about to get into explanations anyway, not then, not in front of my assistant and some tall overeager guy I didn’t know. Actually, we’ve met before. Actually, we’ve slept together. Actually, we were in love. Actually, she left me, and I haven’t seen her since.
Years ago, I said. So anyway, Mal is tied up for a little while longer. Why don’t I show you around?
IF I SAY it was dreamlike, I’m not just talking about the unlikelihood of it, or about wish fulfillment. There’s a helplessness to dreams: things take their unstoppable course, no matter how bizarre, and even if your dreaming mind is allowed to smile at the absurdity of it, still you have no real choice but to go through your paces, speak your lines. Dex walked between us down the broad hallway, hands folded under his arms, doing all the talking. I could see why Mal had found it so hard to say no to him. He’s just the sort of highly motivated young eccentric Mal can never resist. About six-three, comically skinny, with short, loosely curled red hair; even on his best behavior he gave off a kind of poorly restrained restlessness, as if events, or other people, were never quite moving at his pace. Just standing next to him was like being in New York again. He’d crashed an opening at Mary Boone to petition Mal to be allowed to shoot a documentary about the remarkable rise of Palladio and its founder; and Mal, while making it clear he would never allow any filming to go on inside the mansion, was smitten enough to invite Dex down to Charlottesville anyway, just for a visit.
