The Blazing World (26 page)

Lord’s grave was never quiet. I wanted to shake Harry, force her to end it. Now was her chance to stop the merry-go-round, to jump off. I would help her. Bruno, her hero and protector, would swoop in to save her from herself. “Let’s go away,” I said. “Let’s leave.”

Harry shook her head.

I told her I loved her. I love you to high heaven, I said. I love you. Do you hear me?

She heard me. “I love you, too,” she said. She was not thinking of me.

Bruno, high on his noble sentiments, Mr. Rescue: All I needed was a phone booth where I could change into the suit. There aren’t phone booths anymore, old man.

I remember the sun made rectangles of light on the wood floor. I remember Harry’s sad face, and I remember the words that popped up to be quoted on that palimpsest in my mind. They came from the book of Ruth, King James version, the words of a woman who trailed after another woman and refused to turn back.

Whither thou goest, I will go
, I said to Harry.
Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried
.

Harry smiled a wobbly smile. “That’s nice, Bruno,” she said.

It felt like a kick to the gut.

Oswald Case

(written statement)

Rune never gave up on irony. That was his victory. Despite the general nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again moaning and hand-wringing and great American soul-searching that went on in the aftermath of 9/11, if you ask yourself whether the art world was permanently altered by that day, the answer is an earsplitting no. After all is said and done, three thousand dead downtown ranks as a sneeze in the market, a momentary convulsion of conscience. Yes, artists whined about meaninglessness and a new beginning, but a few months later, it was life
comme d’habitude
. Mea culpa. I am the author of “Irony Died at Ground Zero,” published in
The Gothamite
the week of September 23. Let me put it this way: When I banished irony, that most necessary of all forms of thought, I meant it. Lower Manhattan was a freshly dug graveyard, and I thought I had been remade as Monsieur Sincère. Furthermore, I have since acknowledged my error. That is more than I can say for any number of my esteemed colleagues who poured their thwarted literary ambitions into cringingly bad articles. They forgot the motto of our noble profession: here today, gone tomorrow. My offering to the end-of-irony moment was not nearly as bathetic as most of the garbage that was published after 9/11. How many times did I read: “Who could have imagined it?” Every two-bit screenwriter in Hollywood had already imagined it. Rune had it right. He knew the spectacle would be used, exploited, rewritten in a thousand different and, mostly, tawdry ways.

When I interviewed him in 2002, he talked about his struggle with catastrophe as art. How could a slaughter that had already been manipulated into multiple narratives be represented? He talked about the speed of technology, about simulation, and finally, about awe. He said he’d never experienced it—awe. He hadn’t felt it before 9/11. He called it “emotional superconductivity.” He wanted it in the work. I know that Harriet Burden believed she had found a third cover for her this-woman-can-become-a-celebrity-artist-too campaign. The question is, did she intervene enough to rob Larsen of credit for the works, which would be shown a year and a half later? I think not. I think he knew exactly what he was doing.
Beneath
hit the art world like a tornado. The timing was brilliant. He knew that to show the images everyone saw on television on 9/11, and for a few days after, would not do, not in New York City. But if you had to walk through a maze, and look at black-and-white film footage of devastated cars or kiddy shoes covered in dust, along with that weird mask fantasy sequence (which I believe Rune directed), the viewer’s experience would increase in intensity. He used Harriet Burden as a muse. I give her credit for that, but mingling the fantasy images with others that were completely banal—Rune with a coffee cup looking out the window or snow falling—directly referenced
Banality
. Also, the robotic motions of the dancers are pure Rune.
Beneath
looks nothing like those squishy Burden works that are being shown now.

Well before my interview with him, Rune had become a bad-boy celebrity, which of course means that he was not nice. He was too complicated to be a nice guy, but then, niceness is not only overrated, it is far less attractive than it’s cracked up to be. People love a large, meaty ME. They say they don’t, but in the art world a cowardly, shrinking personality is repellent (unless it has been highly cultivated as a type), and narcissism is a magnet. The artist’s persona is part of the sell. Picasso was a genius, but look at the mythology. He ate people for breakfast. He had lots of women and loved torturing them. He was King of Confidence, a bloated, swaggering tower of talent whose scribbles on napkins are worth more than I will earn in a lifetime. If you don’t seduce people, you don’t have a chance. Look at Schnabel in his pajamas. Entitlement works.

In that first interview, Rune revealed his savvy for the ins and outs of the market. When I asked him about his last show, he said, “
The Banality of Glamour
did well because collectors found it edgy. They liked the reference to Hannah Arendt, even though they’d never read her book. I’ve never read it either. But the play on glamour and evil is fun because evil is not supposed to be banal but now glamour is.” By then, Rune had recorded himself daily for years: the life of the artist as a young man about town. I shall take this opportunity to correct a tired old truism: “Beauty is skin deep.” It is not. It is life down deep. Beauty makes you. Six-three, blond, blue-eyed, and fine-featured, Rune’s northern European roots blared as loudly as the commercials on TV that run at several decibels higher than the regular shows. His eyes were pale blue. There were times when I looked at him and felt as if I were talking to one of the replicants in
Blade
Runner
.

For a while in the nineties, he adopted metrosexual affectations—cologne, manicures, hair mousse, body scrubs, self-tanners—and dutifully filmed all these applications for his diary. Then he stopped. He turned himself into an art cowboy
au naturel
—stiff jeans, boots, sweaty T-shirt. Not long after his Western incarnation, he appeared everywhere in sleek Italian suits and made loud statements about this or that artist, which entered the rumor mill. He understood his image, understood that he was his own object, a body to be sculpted in his work. “It’s fake,” he said. “The film diary is a big fake. That’s the point. It’s not that I staged it. It’s me waking up. It’s me at the parties. The fakeness comes from the fact that you believe you’re seeing something when you’re not seeing anything except what you put into the picture. That’s what celebrity culture is. It’s not about anything except your desire that can be bought for a price. I know that if I stick to some story about myself, I’ll get boring. Look at Madonna. My reinventions mean that I have no looks, no style. I’m bland, a bland blond. I haven’t created anything new. It’s been done before, but I’ve added little twists and turns, and people like it. I actively fight against every trace of originality.”

His stance was a tease, a smart, complicated tease about America as consumer heaven where things are neither original nor real. Whether they knew what he was talking about or not, Rune made people around him feel hip. The colored crosses were so simple, they excited people. They were as easy to read as road signs, but hard to read, too. What did they mean? Modeled on the Red Cross symbol in different colors, they could have been an ironic reference to the whole history of Christianity or to the Crusades. After 9/11 they looked prescient: East-and-West conflict, civilizations at war. Or were they just a shape? Yes, some critics went after him, but I didn’t notice that collectors cared. The true irony is that September 11 did change him. He felt he needed a new aesthetic, at least for a while. Maybe this led him to Burden, an artist so obscure she wasn’t even a has-been. Personally, I find her work to be little more than neo-Romantic gushing—high-flown, sentimental, and embarrassing—one big agonized groan that reminds me of a half-baked Existentialism. I have yet to penetrate the supposed interest of her “metamorphs.”

Political correctness and identity politics have infiltrated the visual arts as well as every other aspect of cosmopolitan American culture and account for a good part of the applause that her work now receives. The poor, neglected woman who couldn’t find a gallery! Poor Harriet Burden, rich as Croesus in five-hundred-dollar hats, the widow of one of the shrewdest dealers ever to work in New York City. My heart goes out to her. It throbs with sympathy. Art is not a democracy, but this blatant truth must not even be whispered in our prickly, tickly city of do-gooder, liberal, decaffeinated-skim-latte-drinking mediocrities blind to the facts. To suggest, even for an instant, that there might be more men than women in art because men are better artists is to risk being tortured by the thought police. And yet, read
The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker, distinguished psychologist and a bold prophet of the new frontier—genetics-based sociobiology—and then tell me that men and women are identical, that they have the same strengths, that “gender” difference is environmental. Test after test in brain science has determined that men score higher on visual/spatial skills and mental rotation tests than women. Might this not, in part at least, be related to the dominant position of men in the visual arts? It’s evolutionary. It’s in the cards. Men are hunters and fighters, active, not passive, doers and makers. Women have been nurturers, caring for children. They had to stay close to the nest. Has there been discrimination and prejudice against women? Of course there has, but feminism hasn’t helped the cause; feminists have screamed about numbers and quotas and turned women artists into political tools. The good ones want nothing to do with feminism. Harriet Burden is the latest craze in a venerable tradition: the woman victimized by a “phallocentric” world, which stomped on her greatness.

Nevertheless, Rune was looking for a way to mix up his work—to add a retrograde element, to introduce something of the past, some nostalgia for the avant-garde, for Expressionism, for art before Warholian accommodation to the ultimate consumer fantasy—the world before Campbell’s soup. I think he found it in Burden. She didn’t find him. He found her. Later, he told me as much. The woman was well placed, and he had known her husband. Just for the record, Rune wasn’t gay. Women were all over the man. They sidled up to him. They brushed against him, as if by accident. They cooed and babbled at him with silly, dumbstruck expressions on their faces. Young and beautiful women and not-so-young-and-not-so-beautiful women couldn’t get enough of him. I recall a pool game Rune and I played together downtown. Afterward, we had a beer at the bar. A babe in her twenties, a real babe (forgive me if I ruffle any delicate feathers with this mild slang for “gorgeous female”) with dark hair and a tight shirt tied at her waist, so her navel with a little gold ring in it was just visible, walked over and sat down on the stool next to him. She didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t buy her a drink.
Niente
. He turned to me and said, “Night, Ozzie.” I watched them leave the bar together and turn right at the corner.

For the profile on Rune I needed the facts. They’re sticklers for facts at
The
Gothamite
. They check and recheck the facts. The joke on all this fastidious fact-checking is that you’re allowed to humiliate anybody, as long as the subject’s birth date, hometown, and all numbers connected to him are flawless. And you can quote out-and-out liars, as long as you quote them correctly. It gives roundness to a piece: a bit of positive, a bit of negative. We like balanced reporting. But balance is most important in things serious. Politics is serious. Muckraking is serious, and it must have prose to match. War zones require that all humor and/or irony cease and desist. The arts are not serious, not in the U.S. of A. They do not involve life and death. We are not French. In reviews of the arts, if you spell the guy’s name right, you can write whatever you want. You can send hate mail to whichever pompous ass you choose in the form of a review and make a reputation for yourself in the bargain. Do I offend?
Excusez-moi.

H. L. Mencken once wrote that if a critic “devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner,” he gets respect. The contemporary platitudes are: Dump on white males, encourage diversity, and destroy the canon; or conversely, wave the flag for the canon and old-fashioned artistic virtues. Of course, Mencken was writing back in the day when college meant literacy. It no longer does. I could regale you for hours with stories of our interns, fresh from the Ivy League, who cannot distinguish between
like
and
as
, who cannot conjugate the verb
to lie
(as in lie down on the floor), whose diction errors give me gooseflesh, but from their semiliterate mouths come one transient “right-thinking” platitude after the other. How I yearn for the future, when these people who cannot write a cursive hand have taken over the world.