She had to put an end to this.
Three… one… one. Four rings before an answer, followed by a series of recorded messages about the opposite-side-of-the-street parking schedule. Had she really expected a sugary sweet voice to greet her with, “What can 311 help you with today?”
When a live operator finally picked up, Alice explained the situation. Gallery manager. Protesters. Name-calling signs. She did her best to include the buzzwords she thought would make a difference.
“Has anyone trespassed on your property?”
“Um, no, they didn’t actually enter inside the property. Yet.”
“Have they engaged in any physical contact with you or anyone else, ma’am?”
Ma’am. Alice knew that being called ma’am by a government employee was not a good sign. “Well, no, nothing physical. But they’re creating a public disturbance.”
“Please hold.”
Three minutes until she returned. “If these people are exercising their rights to free speech, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for you.”
“But they’re creating a public disturbance.”
“Ma’am, you’re running a business in New York City. What you think of as a public disturbance, some people call the city’s flavor. You know what I mean?”
“Would you be saying that if I were calling from Citibank instead of some fledgling art gallery in the Meatpacking District?”
“Please hold.”
Three more minutes. The cameras still rolling outside.
A male voice came on the line. That in itself bothered her for some reason.
“Miss Humphrey?”
She wondered if her actual name was a promotion from ma’am or simply an escalation. “Yes.”
“If you’d like to go to your local precinct to file a report, the address is-”
“I don’t want to go to my local precinct, because I’m at work trying to run a business. I am calling you because these extremists are disrupting that business.”
“I realize that, ma’am, but-”
“Shouldn’t someone at least come out here to see what’s happening and decide whether it’s legal or not? I mean, I’m not a police officer. I don’t know the difference between protected speech and public nuisance. Isn’t that what police are for?”
“Please hold.”
Alice looked at the time on her laptop. Minutes ticking by. Camera rolling outside.
She heard a long, solid beep over the Muzak piped in by 311. The other line. It could be Drew. She stared at the buttons at the phone, realizing she had no clue how to click over to the other line without disconnecting the call. Fuck.
“Highline Gallery. This is Alice.”
“Good, you’re still at your desk.”
She recognized her father’s voice.
“Hey, Papa. Can I call you back?”
Up until last year, her father had been a regular caller. Too regular, in fact. Regular enough that she’d made a point never to mention her cell phone number.
“Don’t say anything to those cocksucking reporters.”
“Excuse me. What?”
“I’ve been pulled into this game before. Don’t do it. Stay away from the vultures.”
“Wait, this mess is out there already?”
“Your mother called me. It’s on New York One as we speak.” The magic of live television. “A group like that will want to paint you as the bad guy. Same as
It had been a long time since she’d felt like this with her father. Symbiotic. Comfortable. Papa to the rescue.
She heard the long, solid beep again. Maybe Drew had finally picked up her messages.
“I gotta go, Papa. But thanks. Really… Highline Gallery, this is Alice.”
“Hi, Peter Morse from the
She recited a few of Schuler’s bullet points. The SELF series. Self-introspection. Mainstreaming radicalism. She left out the part where she herself had spent a good couple of weeks calling the stuff pornography.
“Sounds like it’s right out of the artist’s brochure. Between me and you, I’m looking at this guy’s stuff online. Is there really any art to be found there? The Reverend George Hardy of the Redemption of Christ Church certainly thinks not.”
“The value of art-and speech-is in the eye of the beholder and the ear of the listener. Mr. Schuler has a right to free speech, and we’ve been happy to help showcase his provocative images.” She found herself grateful for her father’s advice. “Whether people enjoy them or not, if the pictures get the community thinking and talking, we think that’s all for the bett-”
“And what about the allegations that the photographs contain pornographic images of minor children?”
“Excuse me?”
“The Redemption of Christ Church alleges that one of the models in Schuler’s series is a teenage girl. That would make the photographs in violation of criminal law, unprotected by the First Amendment.”
She immediately swiveled her chair to face one of Schuler’s photographs, the one called
“No comment.”
Chapter Thirteen
A lice had been hunched over her laptop so long that the small of her back ached. When she lifted her wrists to work out the kinks, she saw a crease in her skin from the pressure of her forearms against the edge of her pine breakfast table.
Despite all of her online digging, she still had no one to contact about the growing public relations disaster besides Drew Campbell, who was not answering his phone.
As a car commercial faded out on the television, she heard the familiar staccato theme music of the Channel 7 news. She reached for the remote control to crank up the volume.
A male anchor in a light blue suit with a plastered mushroom of thick black hair introduced the story. “City officials and local religious leaders are weighing in on the elusive line between art and obscenity tonight, thanks to a controversial exhibit at a new gallery in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The Highline Gallery has not yet been open a week and already has the city in an uproar.”
The screen flashed to images pulled directly from Hans Schuler’s Web site, and the audio switched to a female correspondent’s voice.
“Blood. Saliva. Nudity.” The camera tightened in around each referenced image, cropping any nudity they could not air. “Unknown artist Hans Schuler calls the photographs in his SELF series ‘a portrait in radical introspection.’ A growing chorus of critics, however, say Schuler has crossed a line into obscenity.”
Flash to a female protester. “Those pictures are disgusting. They shouldn’t be in a gallery, and they shouldn’t be on the Internet.”
“Of course, nudity in the art world is nothing new,” the correspondent announced. “The Museum of Modern Art
