Monster Media 1993 #2/Image.iso/magazine/rubyv21.zip/RUBY21-2

Text File | 1993-04-18 | 9KB | 146 lines

Copyright 1993(c)

                                    CRITICS
                            By William J. Slattery

      Artùr Sidanto stopped before a predominantly green acrylic at
the Whitney during the activist art display and winced. He put his
right hand up over his head and tugged on his left ear.
      The woman standing a few feet away looked at him with
curiosity. You don't see too many people pulling left ears with
right hands. Not in public you don't.
      Sidanto jammed his left hand into his jacket pocket and thrust
his right foot forward. He stood like this, motionless, for a few
seconds and then reversed everything. The hand that had been in
the pocket tugged the other ear now. The right hand now plunged
into the jacket pocket. He yanked at his right ear with his left
hand. He withdrew his right foot and extended his left. He repeated
and reversed these peculiar motions a number of times over the
course of a minute or so and while his hands waved about and ear-
clutched, he screwed up his face in an improbable sequence of
grimaces, sometimes frowning, sometimes smiling, sometimes eye-pop-
ping, sometimes squinting. While waving his arms and grimacing, he
paced rapidly back and forth in front the painting and muttered
softly to himself. Occasionally he barked, "Hah!" in a loud voice.
      The woman watching curiously was becoming alarmed.
      Professor Sidanto was indisputably the nation's best-known art
critic. He was popular with all segments of society, even among
people who knew nothing of art. Sidanto was a warm, embracing man,
an animated and unpretentious speaker, and the author of many
graceful and learned books of philosophy. His most famous work in
aesthetics, The Transfiguration of the Unexceptional, had been a
classic now for almost two decades. He held the Olsonian Professor
of Philosophy at Harvard which meant, in effect, that he was the
head of the university's philosophy department.
      The alarmed woman standing a few feet away was a serious
patron of the arts and knew who Sidanto was, of course. She had
heard him lecture many times and had seen him on television and
read about him in newspapers and magazines. She had actually read
some of his philosophical works and, like art lovers everywhere,
she had nearly committed Transfiguration of the Unexceptional to
memory.
      Although she knew the professor's general philosophical views
and the details of his aesthetics, the woman had no way of knowing
that this gyrating tweedy little man was, for him, behaving
normally. When looking at a painting about which he was preparing
a lecture or a written commentary, he unfailingly paced and waved
his arms and grimaced, muttered and barked. This conduct indicated
merely that Sidanto was thinking. It did not indicate that he was
crazy.
      "I hate that painting," the woman said, gesturing dismissively
in its direction. She said this because she did not want Professor
Sidanto to think that he was alone in his feelings. She believed
that finding an ally close at hand might calm him and return him
to his senses.
      Sidanto stopped pacing. He looked at the woman, seeing her for
the first time, and smiled tentatively. He clasped his hands behind
his back and bowed his engaging and famed Charlie Chaplin bow.
      "I emphatically don't like it much myself," he said in that
fluid, cultured voice she had heard so often. "In fact I hate it.
It is art, of course, but it is hateful art. Also it is propaganda
of a most blatant and distasteful sort. Almost Stalinist. And that
green is slimy."
      Sidanto shuddered.
      He seems quite himself now, the woman thought. She decided to
soothe him further. She withdrew a lipstick from her purse and
removed its cover and twisted the base so that the glossy rouge
penis was exposed.
      "I think I shall disfigure this terrible painting. It offends
me that much. It deserves dishonor."
      She looked at him, eyebrows arched, half smiling.
      "Dare me and I'll do it," she said, her hand extended toward
the painting, waiting.
      Sidanto rubbed his hands together. Now was a good time to
disappear, he thought. All critics know how to disappear. When
confronted by someone demanding to know exactly what art is, for
example, any critic who has been in the game for even a short time
knows exactly what to do. Poof! is what critics do; they
dematerialize, vanish without a trace.
      Sidanto began backing away, rubbing his hands and smiling.
He began fading right before her eyes.
      It suddenly occurred to him, it came to him in a flash of
insight and inspiration, that it wouldn't be a bad idea at all to
deface this ghastly painting. It was indeed an offense. It had no
business being here in the Whitney. Someone had made a terrible
mistake and marking it with lipstick would point out the
egregiousness of the error and underline it.
      He stopped backing away. He ceased dematerializing.
He thought about the act and the consequences of smearing lipstick
on the painting. The idea appealed to him. Yes, he thought, why
not? He had for years contemplated ceasing being pleasantly
professorial and cautious and conventional and serious. He had
often, and increasingly, thought of doing or saying something
outrageous, something entirely out of character. He was a man
without enemies and he resented it. He was becoming bland. He was
universally respected and it was becoming boring. Perhaps here and
now was the time to draw attention to the fact that he was a man
of passion, a man who occasionally acted on whim, who could behave
capriciously when the spirit moved him. He was, he knew, an icon,
an institution. Here was his chance to recapture his humanity by
doing something indisputably ridiculous. Fuck being an institution,
he thought. Yes, indeed. Fuck it.
      "I dare you," he said quietly.
      He placed his hands on his hips and waited to see what the
woman would do. He wondered, too, what he would do if the woman
actually lipsticked the painting. He had never been an accomplice
before. He liked the feeling of it.
      He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.
He took a tentative step forward. Then another. Yes, he thought,
sure of himself this time, it is definitely time for me to make a
statement. This painting is an artistic piece of shit and someone
should say so. Who better than I?
      The woman had been making what she thought was an absurd
suggestion. Yet here was the eminent professor Sidanto closing in
on her with a distinctly unprofessorial look in his eye. He had
dared her and she was about to accept the dare. LOCAL SOCIETY
PILLAR MARS ART WORK cried the Stamford Advocate. '54 ALUMNA MAKES
ARTISTIC STATEMENT said the Bryn Mawr Alumnae News defensively.
DROPPED FROM SOCIAL REGISTER sniggered The Times.
      The woman hesitated as these imagined headlines flashed across
her consciousness.
      What would her children think?
      Fuck what they think, she thought.
      The woman put the lipstick to the upper right hand corner of
the painting and drew a diagonal red line to the lower left corner.
The red stood out hideously against the scummy green. She repeated
the slash from the upper left. Sidanto now stood by her side. She
handed him the lipstick. He thought for a moment. The painting was
now divided into quadrants. In his meticulous handwriting, he put
one word in each of three quadrants beginning with the upper left.
SIDANTO HATES THIS, he wrote and initialled the lower left section
with his well-known and unmistakable intertwined monogram, AS.
      With a flourish, Professor Sidanto handed the woman back her
lipstick. She deposited it in her purse with a theatrical sweep.
He invited her to have a drink. She accepted with alacrity, and
thus began the famous affair that continues to this day.
      The woman is a widow and Artùr Sidanto is married to a worldly
and understanding painter, so everything is all right and no one
has been hurt. Sidanto gets invited out for a beer once in a while
by people who wouldn't have dared such ordinary intimacy with such
a great man and the woman's children think she's just wonderful and
not the least bit stuffy. The artist who painted the terrible
painting has gone into another line of work and is very happy. The
Whitney, too, is delighted to have the famous Red and Green Sidanto
in its possession, the famous Red and Green Sidanto that spelled
the end of activist art.
                                      END