The stink is thick as fog. That smell no one wants to breathe.
And, walking toward the stage, toward the circle around the ghost light, the Duke of Vandals says, “Before I ever sold a painting . . .” He looks back to make sure we'll follow, and the Duke says, “I used to be the opposite of an art thief . . .”
While, room by room, the sun starts to come up.
And in our heads, we all write this down: The opposite of an art thief . . .
For Hire
A Poem About the Duke of Vandals
“Nobody calls Michelangelo the Vatican's bitch,” says the Duke of Vandals,
just because he begged Pope Julius for work.
The Duke onstage, his scruffy jaw, scrub brush with pale stubble,
it goes round and round, kneading and grinding
a wad of nicotine gum.
His gray sweatshirt and canvas pants are flecked with dried raisins of red, dark-red,
yellow, blue and green, brown, black and white paint.
His hair tumbles behind him, a tangle of brass wire, tarnished dark with oil
and dusted with sticky flakes of dandruff.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
a slide show of portraits and allegories, still lifes and landscapes.
All of this ancient art, it uses his face, his chest, his stocking feet in sandals
as a gallery wall.
The Duke of Vandals, he says, “No one calls Mozart a corporate whore”
because he worked for the Archbishop of Salzburg.
After that, then wrote The Magic Flute,
wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
paid by trickle-down cash from Giuseppe Bridi and his big-money silk industry.
Nor do we call Leonardo da Vinci a sellout,
a tool,
because he slopped paint for gold from Pope Leo X and Lorenzo de' Medici.
“No,” says the Duke, “We look at The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa
and never know who paid the bills to create them.”
What matters, he says, is what the artist leaves behind, the artwork.
Not how you paid the rent.
Ambition
A Story by the Duke of Vandals
One judge called it “malicious mischief.” Another judge called it “destruction of public property.”
In New York City, after the guards caught him in the Museum of Modern Art, the judge reduced the charge to “littering” as a final insult. After the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the judge called what Terry Fletcher did “graffiti.”
At the Getty or the Frick or the National Gallery, Terry's crime was always the same. People just couldn't agree on what to call it.
None of these judges should be confused with the Honorable Lester G. Myers of the Los Angeles County District Court, art collector and downright nice guy. The art critic is not Tannity Brewster, writer and knower of all things cultural. And relax, no way is the gallery owner Dennis Bradshaw, famous for his Pell/Mell Gallery, where just by coincidence people get shot in the back. Every once in a while.
No, any resemblance between these characters and anyone living or dead is a complete accident.
What happens here is all made up. No one is anyone except Mr. Terry Fletcher.
Just keep telling yourself this is a story. None of this is for real.
The basic idea came from England, where art students go to the post office and take stacks of the cheap address labels available at no charge. Every post office has stacks and stacks of these labels, each one the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A size easy to hide in your palm. The labels had a peel-off backing of waxed paper. Under that was a layer of glue designed to stick to anything, forever.
That was their real charm. Young artists—nobodies, really—they could sit in their studio and paint a perfect miniature. Or sketch a charcoal study after painting the sticker with a base coat of white.
Then, sticker in hand, they'd go out to hang their own little show. In pubs. In train carriages. The back seats of taxicabs. And their work would “hang” there for longer than you'd guess.
The post office made the stickers with such cheap paper that you could never peel them away. The paper tore in specks and flakes at the edge, but even there, the glue would stay. The raw glue, looking lumpy and yellow as snot, it collected dust and smoke until it was a black smear so much worse than the little art-school painting it had been. Folks found that any artwork was better than the ugly glue it left behind.
So—people let the art hang. In elevators and toilet stalls. In church confessionals and department-store fitting rooms. Most of these, places where a few paintings might help. Most of the painters just happy to have their work seen. Forever.
Still—leave it to an American to take something too far.
For Terry Fletcher, the big idea came while he stood in line to see the Mona Lisa. The closer he got, the painting never got any bigger. He had art textbooks that were bigger. Here was the most famous painting in the world, and it was smaller than a sofa cushion.
Anywhere else, it would be so easy to slip inside your coat and cross your arms over. To steal.
As the line crept closer to the painting, it didn't look like such a miracle, either. Here was the masterwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and it didn't look worth wasting a whole day on his hind legs in Paris, France.
It was the same letdown that Terry Fletcher felt after seeing that ancient petroglyph of the dancing flute player, Kokopelli, after seeing it painted on neckties and glazed on dog-food bowls. Hooked into bathmats and toilet-seat covers. When, at last, he'd gone to New Mexico and seen the original, hammered and painted into a cliff face—his first thought was: How trite . . .
All the dinky old masterpiece paintings with their puffed-up reputations, the British post-office stickers, what it meant was, he could do better. He could paint better and sneak his work into museums, framed and wrapped inside
