Patron of the Arts

“But you are famous as an art lover—”

“That’s a long way from being an artist,” I said. “A long way.”

Madelon said with a smile, “I love going to museums with you, to galleries and studios and things. You say what’s in your mind and you don’t try to phony it up.”

I took a sip of wine and swirled the glass. “I’ve never been a man who thought you should be especially quiet in a museum. As long as I don’t really bother anyone else, or intrude on their privacy, I’ve always felt free to talk, laugh, discuss, or be silent. Art isn’t holy to me, not in that way.

“Something in a frame or on a pedestal does not require either my silence or my speech. Something in a frame is not automatically art, it is just something someone framed.”

“Sturgeon’s Law?” suggested Madelon. “Ninety percent of everything is crud. Including this statement.”

“Yes, and I’m afraid that’s even more so with art. All my adult life people have kept close to me in galleries, because if I am with someone, I talk of what I see and feel, and some people, strangers even, seem to find that interesting. Or maybe it’s just unusual. I try not to talk of what I think the artist meant or felt, but of what I felt, of what the artist communicated to me.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Madelon, “how I dislike those who explain it to you!”

I laughed, too. “You will never hear me say ‘A unique synthesis of the purely somatic and the archly conceptualized with an almost verbal communication in his aesthetic cognitions.’ I will never attribute motives and intellectualizations to men I don’t know personally, and well.”

“But there are obvious influences,” Madelon said.

“Remember that Peruvian exhibit we saw? In the jungle world that those potters and craftsmen lived in, which was their only reality—their only concept of reality—they created those jaguar pots that are as fierce and as deadly a manifestation of fear and respect as I’ve ever seen. I might talk of the impact of the Church on some artist, who painted what he felt, then added haloes and touched in the symbols of the saint he had selected.”

“But all artists are influenced by their times,” Madelon insisted.

“And the times by the artists.”

“Of course. But I always speak for me, not the artist. If he or she is any good at all the work speaks louder, clearer, and more concisely than anything I might say, and for a hellava lot longer.”

“What about those new ones, the Fragmentalists? They work with computers and cloud chambers, and never see their work; only knowing that it happened.”

“Yes, it existed, for a nanosecond or two, and then was gone. Since no one can see their art, I suppose that’s why they prattle so much about it. It can’t speak, so they will.”

Madelon smiled at me in the dusk. “Brian, I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t an active, working artist to be as involved with art as you are.”

I shrugged. “It is simply part of my life. I dislike it when people buy art for investment. Art futures is a phrase I’ve heard far too often. It might be like buying future orgasms, I don’t know.” I looked again at the fading firetrails. “I have always tried to be myself. But the best possible me. My greatest failures are when I fail myself.”

I turned and smiled at the most beautiful woman I knew. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Me,” she said. “Only the best possible me.”

“Would you be interested in investing in a future orgasm?” I asked.

She unwound gracefully from the chair, smiling and silken. “Are you asking me to forsake Hilary’s many pleasures, my dear sir?”

“I am. I had something more intimate in mind.”

“I was hoping you had been taking your ESP pills, darling. I was thinking along those lines myself.”

We flew to San Salvador and rode through the tall grasses on my cattle ranch there and made love by a stream. Madelon was witness to me disciplining a sloppy supervisor, who had permitted the cattle to consume too