about the length of an adult hand, and are held in place by a delicate network of wires disguised as hair, which allows them to move their heads and tails. Snakes in general do not know much about art, so they get very nervous if we force them to put up with being clipped immobile for six hours a day. Some of them die on Sylvie's head; others thrash about despairingly. Ecological groups and animal protection societies have denounced the exhibit and protested outside the doors of the museums and galleries where it has been shown. All of them are well known to the organisers, and are a harmless minority compared to the people who protest against the other works in the collection. But nobody thinks of poor Sylvie. It's true she is well paid, but what can compensate for her insomnia, the strange repugnance she feels at combing her hair, the ghostly feeling she gets sometimes when she is talking, laughing, having dinner in a restaurant or making love, a feeling that someone is caressing her hair, pulling at her curls, scratching her head with nail-less fingers?
Ten metres behind Sylvie stands Hiro Nadei, an aged Japanese man painted in ochres, who holds a small jasmine flower in his right hand. Hiro is a real survivor of Hiroshima; he is sixty-six years old. When his city exploded in an atomic hell, he was five. He was in his back garden holding a jasmine in that same hand. Rescued almost unscathed from the ruins, the hardest thing was to get him to open his right hand, which was clenched like a fist. A month later, he let go: the flower was crushed beyond recognition. Two years ago, Van Tysch heard his story and called him to do a small painting. Mr Nadei was delighted: he is a widower, lives on his own, and wants to close the circle of his life dying as he should have done at that dreadful moment. The painting, entitled The Closed Hand, has been sold to an American. At the other end of the gallery, Kim, a young Filipino, is in the last stages of AIDS. He is on show lying in bed painted deathly grey, with an intravenous drip stuck like a skewer in his shrivelled arm. He has difficulty breathing, and occasionally has to be given oxygen. He is the sixteenth substitute for a work whose continuing existence makes it art: a painting which lasts as long as human tragedy. Of course, he is not doing it for the money. Like all his predecessors, Kim wants to die as a work of art. He wants his death to have a meaning. He wants to make the work last, precisely so that it will not last. Stein has found a brilliant phrase to describe it (he is very good at that kind of thing): Terminal Phase is the first painting in the history of art which will be beautiful only after it ceases to exist.
Near Terminal Phase is The Doll. Jennifer Halley, an eight-year-old work, is painted pink and stands wearing a black dress, cradling a doll in her arms. But the doll is alive, and looks like one of those starving embryos with a stomach like a black grape that sometimes raise their head out of the well that is the Third World. And what is apparently a child is, in fact, an adult – a dwarf and achondroplastic canvas by the name of Steve. Steve is naked, painted in dark colours, and cries and squirms in Jennifer's arms. A little further on is the hanged man, swinging on his scaffold. Next to him are the tortured girls. The pungent stench that brings tears to the eyes comes from Hitler, dressed in skins from dead animals sewn together. The mental retards in executive suits appear fascinated by the colours of their ties and the saliva dribbling down them like diamonds. Today Tuesday 27 June, four thousand people have visited this incredible exhibition. Because the screening process is so slow, it is impossible to accommodate all those waiting in a long human line down beyond the steps of the Haus der Kunst. Those who have not got in will have to come back tomorrow. The Monsters are finishing their day. Those paintings which have a brain, consciousness, limbs and faces, manage to feel happy about it, and say goodbye to their colleagues. It is time to rest. But none of them looks over at the circular podium in the centre of the room. The 'terrible' is in the circle. This is where the real Monsters are kept.
The rattle of lifting gear, and the protective glass surrounding them is removed. Five technicians and as many security guards were waiting at the foot of the high podium. The glass is heavy, hermetically sealed, and takes a minute to be lifted off completely. It is a fifteen-centimetre thick cylinder of transparent glass, with a similar top. For the first few months the exhibition was on tour, there was no such top. A bullet-proof glass wall three metres high was thought to be more than enough to protect them. Then when Monsters was on show in Paris, a visitor threw shit at the exhibit. It was his own excrement (as he later confessed), which he had been carrying in his pocket, and which had passed unnoticed through the metal detector, the X-ray screen, the body doppler, the image analysis programmes used on bulky clothing, pregnant women's stomachs, and pushchairs.
In the twenty-first century, as a journalist wrote about the incident, it is still possible to be a terrorist by throwing shit. Who knows, perhaps in the twenty-second century it will have become impossible. Tossed with an expert arm when the visitor reached the front row and was standing next to the security rope, the excrement flew in an arc through the air. Unfortunately, it missed: the faeces hit the top edge of the glass barrier and bounced back onto the public. Have you ever felt -asked the same journalist in his article – when you were visiting a modern art museum, that you were having shit thrown in your face?
Ever since then, the barrier protecting the Walden brothers had a top as well.
'How do you feel, Hubert?' 'Fine, Arnold, and you?' 'Not too bad, Hubert.'
The grey exhibition clothes the two brothers were wearing came off easily thanks to hidden zips at the back. Stark naked, Hubertus and Arnoldus Walden looked like two huge sumo wrestlers fawned over by their attentive trainers. The technicians wrapped them in robes with their names on the back, and they tied them over their colossal stomachs, which overhung tiny genitals as bald as quails' eggs.
'One day you'll give us the wrong robe, and the price of the work will collapse.'
The technicians laughed as one at this shaft of wit – they had strict instructions not to get on the wrong side of the brothers.
'Pass me that cottonwool, Franz,' said Arnoldus. 'You're rubbing me as gently as though I were your mother.'
'Mr Roberston called again,' an assistant commented.
'He calls us every day,' Hubertus said mockingly. 'He's still thinking of making a film about us, written by that American Nobel prize winner.'
'He's part of the new intelligentsia,' Arnoldus said. 'He looks after us.' 'He wants us.'
'He wants to buy us, Arno.'
That's what I said, Hubert. Could you spray some more solvent on my back, Franz? The paint is itching.'
'We only interest that old bastard because he wants to buy us.'
'Yes, but the Maestro wouldn't sell us to that asshole.' 'Or maybe he would: who knows? He's made interesting offers, hasn't he, Karl?' ‘I think so.'
'He 'thinks' so. Did you hear that, Arno?… Karl 'thinks' so.' 'Be careful with the top step from the podium…' 'We know that, idiot. Are you new? Is this your first day in Conservation?… We're not new to this, you idiot.' 'We're old. We're eternal.'
Jennifer Halley's dress has been taken off. She was wearing only a pair of white socks with pompons (Steve, the achondroplastic model, was being wheeled away on a trolley). Several technicians were rubbing Jennifer's shiny body with cottonwool dipped in solvent. As the Walden brothers passed by her, Hubertus tried to bow his head, although all he succeeded in doing was to lower it into his triple chin.
'Bye, my virginal fairytale princess! May angels fill your dreams!' The girl turned towards him and gave him the finger.
Hubertus carried on smiling, but as he lumbered like a listing boat towards the exit, he screwed up his eyes until they were two dark hyphens.
'How uncouth our little whore is. I've a mind to teach her some manners.'
'Ask Robertson to buy her and put her in your house. Then both of us can teach her a lesson.'
'Don't talk nonsense, Arno. Besides, you know I prefer a good male lobster to a female oyster. Do you mind getting out of the way, miss, we're trying to leave.'
The girl from Conservation leapt out of their path, smiling and saying she was sorry. She was looking after the mental retards. The Walden brothers swept onwards, followed by a group of assistants. Hubertus' robe was purple; Arnoldus' carrot-coloured with green flecks. They had velvet hoods, with cords long enough to go round seven ordinary men. 'Hubert.' 'What is it, Arno?' 'I have to something to confess.'
'…? '
'Yesterday I stole your Walkman. It's in my locker.' 'And I've got something to confess to you, Arno.' 'Tell me, Hubert'
'My Walkman is completely fucked.'
Laughing their high-pitched laughs, the enormous twins left the gallery by an emergency exit.
The Haus der Kunst in Munich is a dull white oblong screened by columns, built next to the English Garden. Its detractors call it the 'Weisswurst'. It was inaugurated seventy years earlier with a triumphal procession by none
