Wakefield (10 page)

Wakefield continues, oblivious to the Devil's digressions. “What, you may be wondering, makes a Robert Motherwell painting worth a million dollars? The common agreement of a few esthetes backed by a dubious appraisal at Christie's? Not at all. What makes a Robert Motherwell painting worth a million dollars is its uniqueness as a work of art made by the one and only Robert Motherwell. When you see a Robert Motherwell painting, you know immediately that Robert Motherwell had no idea what he was going to paint before he painted it. The value of the painting is in what is discovered when one has no idea what he is looking for. And that goes for both Motherwell and the viewer of Motherwell's painting.”

The heckler pipes up: “When is the fire sale?”

The Devil finds himself in total agreement with Wakefield. Like souls and fingerprints, art is singular, it is a product of a man's spirit, of his evolving complexity. Unlike milk from many cows, for instance, it never has the same texture and flavor from one artist to another.

“Buddhist monks create, over many days, an intricate mandala from grains of colored sand. When the mandala is complete, they sweep it away with great ceremony. The form of the mandala is traditional; no deviation is allowed. The monk-artists work to recreate the same design in exactly the same way it's been done for thousands of years. The point is the practice, which is a form of meditation. The final product is irrelevant, a mere material object, only a by-product of spiritual discipline. The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empty and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness. The final product has monetary value only for those outside the process. It is a grotesque accretion of its creator's impurities, a truly filthy object that should be disposed of as quickly as possible, either destroyed or sold in a gallery. Its value is directly proportional to the necessity to eliminate it. The more a work cries out for obliteration, the more valuable it is. It is at the point of greatest contradiction, at the crossroads between its impulses to self-destruct or to continue, that money enters the picture.”

Amazingly, Farkash's accented basso pierces the silence: “I can agree with this!” Heads turn toward Farkash, whose views on anything outside mathematics are completely unknown. Embarassed, he mutters, “Hmmm,” then, “Sorry,” and folds his arms across his chest.

The Devil snorts. He hates Buddhists. It's personal. Buddhists don't recognize his importance. As far as they are concerned, he is just one among many manifestations of the next world. Buddhists have gone as far as to put all the devils they can imagine on a wheel, half of which is occupied by angels. The devils and the angels have equal status and, as the wheel turns, equal opportunities to manifest. The demons and the angels are just different aspects of one another: ugly is beautiful and vice versa. Absolutely no discrimination. The Devil's whole sense of self, which is based on a sense of aristocratic election, is offended by this treatment. He's also offended by the Buddhists' indifference to images, their treatment of art as a superficial manifestation of action, a nervous by-product they seek to eradicate through meditation. An accomplished Buddhist lives in a void made by the erasure of the material world. Imagine an emptiness where all is potential and equal. No emotions, no passions, no crime, no ecstasy, no suffering, no guilt, no reason to make a big deal about anything. It's too depressing. Even more egregious is the growing appeal of Buddhism in his beloved Western world, the center of wealth, the fountainhead of objects and images. A few years ago, a man who abandoned all earthly pursuits and withdrew from his “normal” life would have been put in a mental institution. But because he's a Buddhist, well, now it's okay. Disgusting!

Wakefield is encouraged: Farkash has responded the way his Austro-Hungarian ancestors might have interacted with any performance: they stood and shouted and expressed their feelings. If he can bring out the eighteenth century in a shy mathematician, he should have no problem lifting optimistic fin-de-twentieth-century Americans to the peak of confusion—before he dashes them on the rocks, of course.

“Money undergoes a conversion when one has more of it than is strictly necessary. When there is enough of it to move beyond the strict survival mode, money goes in search of beauty. That is to say, in search of the abstract and the imaginary. Just like poetry, which is the distillation of an excess of language. Too much money and too many words tend toward the poetic. Most people stand between their money and what money wants to do, because people are afraid, and fear leads to boredom. Not many people have a natural inclination to spend their money on objects of art or fanciful ideas. These bored, frightened people want money to simply reproduce, repeat itself. This activity of unimaginative repetition takes a great deal of attention and intention and leaves people exhausted and empty and keeps money prosaic. If you can't use it imaginatively, it's better to let money do its own thing. Money is becoming more and more imaginary all the time: the tenuous agreements that make for value are changing faster than you can think about them.”

Fine, thinks the Devil. He leans out of the window of the projectionist's booth and in an instant evaporates the contents of the audience's pockets and purses. Their wallets, cash, credit cards, IDs, PDAs, cell phones, pagers, and keys, all gone. Everyone feels lighter. They shift in their seats, unaware that they've been pickpocketed.

Voices from the crowd: “Is the value of art obvious?” “What about poetry?” “Whose money are you talking about? Not mine, I hope!” He's got them: confusion reigns, the anxiety is real.

“I'm getting to that. The only thing more useless and unique than a Robert Motherwell painting is a poem. Take this poem:

“I don't think that I shall ever see

“A poem as beautiful

“As my TV.”

Wakefield draws a C inside a circle in the air, then asks the audience to repeat after him:

“I don't think that I shall ever see

“A poem as beautiful

“As my TV.”

This time the audience joins in, although several people leave the theater. Maggie is laughing her sudden laugh.

“This poem is worth one billion dollars. Why? Because I say so. A friend of mine wrote it. If you want that poem, you'll have to give him a billion dollars. If you all agree that this poem is worth a billion dollars—and I don't see why you shouldn't—then that poem
is
worth a billion dollars, and if you buy it you can memorize it and it's good anywhere you go in the world—you just go to the bank and draw as much as you want on it.”

Scattered laughter, some applause, then a few sounds of distress. Some people, conditioned to pat their wallets whenever the subject is money, pat their pockets and don't feel their wallets. Discreetly, they begin searching their pockets.

“Just because this poem is made out of language and anyone can write it down or remember it and ignore that small C with a circle around it that I just drew in the air without anyone noticing … But really, you think it's worthless, don't you? Well, let's look at it a little closer. It isn't a very long poem, so it shouldn't take very long to take it apart. It only has two ideas in it: the idea of Beauty and the idea of TV. The poem itself is a ripoff of an older poem that used the word
tree
instead of TV: ‘I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree.' So it's not even very original, not like a poem by Cavafy, for instance. So these two ideas, Beauty and TV, are made equivalent here, which is as solid a base for equivalency as the one between gold and currency used to be. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so it's firmly in the realm of the imaginary, just like money. On the other hand, TV is composed finitely of what you people are fond of calling content, which pours out in huge gobs of slop into American homes every day. Beauty will always be ahead of any ‘content' produced now or in the future, because I can change the shape and meaning of it at will, or as much as my imagination can imagine. So the equivalency between beauty and content is only provisional, just like gold and money used to be, and if I decide to take beauty off the content standard, then nobody but me will have the key to it. This is precisely the fear that drives content providers now, the fear that people will change their minds about what constitutes beauty. It's a completely well-founded fear because people
do
change their minds about content. They are quickly bored and they demand greater and greater imagination in their content. Matter of fact, the only certainty driving the economy is the certainty that boredom at faster and faster rates is inevitable.”

Nervous whispers in the crowd are beginning now. “Damn, I must have left everything in the office!” “Where the hell are my keys?” “What the fuck?” But rising clear above these whispers is the sudden voice of the Hungarian billionaire: “Now you're getting somewhere, Mr. Wakefield!”

The Devil is amused but anxious. He's enjoying the rising tide of distress in the room, but he fears that Wakefield really may get away from him. He's turning what had been a fairly simple deal, based on the clear understanding that his life might continue if he could prove in a
material
way that he was worth the Devil's time, into something far more murky: quite cleverly, Wakefield has introduced into the equation imagination, a realm where anything is possible, even the nonexistence of the Devil himself. One thing about a deal, any kind of deal: it must take place firmly within the bounds of Newtonian physics. Still, the Devil cannot quite believe that Wakefield isn't after something tangible. He's a con man, after all, a tent preacher. The Devil has conned lots of people himself, judging by the number of them sticking those stupid fish emblems to their car bumpers.

“So imagination, or the lack of it, is a problem for both producers and consumers. To stay competitive, content providers need more and more imagination, and the more they use up, the more people want. The speeding cycle of production-consumption-consumption-production has been analyzed by economists and by sociologists, but what they ignore is that this cycle is taking place within the realm of the Imaginary.”

Right, Mr. Wakefield. Let's have the punchline.

“And in this realm, which doesn't resemble in the least the models economists or sociologists use, poets hold all the cards. If I go back to the original of my billion-dollar poem, I, too, can say ‘only God can make a tree.' So we are back to God. TV and what it gives us can be the equivalent of beauty in a bad parody, but the truth of the matter is that the natural world remains the basis for all value. So it is in relation to the natural world, or ‘nature' that we must measure our human world. Or, to put it another way, virtuality has a boss: Reality.”

Farkash is out of his seat. “You are contradicting yourself! Reality is a construct!”

The impatient Diablo puts a lump in Farkash's throat, making him unable to speak. Butt out, Farkash. Of course Wakefield is contradicting himself. But nature, that's his beat and he likes to hear it praised.

“Yes, Mr. Farkash, but Reality is the oldest virtuality there is, and it has more layers than we can ever understand. Money is virtual, but of recent vintage. The best hope for people who have too much of it is to turn it into something ‘natural,' but it's hard to say what that is anymore. The only thing people know—and they are right—is that the road to this ‘nature'—and I don't mean the kind you see in SUV commercials—goes through the kingdom of the Imaginary. There is no other way to it. Not-yet-written poems are the most valuable commodity your money can buy. They
are
money. Of course, the poem or the painting, once it is purchased, self-destructs, and in so doing destroys its owner. The ‘content' of any work of art is an attack, or at the very least a satire, on materialism. What is most interesting about a work of art cannot be owned, though it can be displayed. But at night, when your guests have gone home, you better turn the damn thing with its face toward the wall, or cover it with a tarp, or lock it in a safe, if you don't want to have nightmares. The content value of art is proportional to the amount of anxiety it produces in its owner.”

Pandemonium breaks out. People are hunting for their wallets under the seats in front of them. Some of them are simultaneously scratching and searching. There is cursing in several languages. Only Paulee, who is sitting in the front row, is smiling calmly. He knows precisely what Wakefield means: he owns more artworks than anyone in the room, but he doesn't live with them. He has stashed them all in bank vaults and lives in an airplane that is spare and clean, containing only a working desk, a baptismal fountain full of wine, and a bed. In addition to the physical art he has stored in places where he rarely looks at it, he has bought the electronic rights to most of the acknowledged masterpieces in the world, including the collections of the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Hermitage, and those images rest quite safely in cyberspace, available by subscription to anyone who needs them. The image of a weeping first girlfriend abandoned in a cornfield in Iowa slips right off the polished surface of Paulee's mind. So what if his pockets are empty.

Wakefield is now shouting over the din: “Take another quality of money: strength. Money confers strength on its owner, which can turn into power if used with any degree of skill. Strength is the ability to live with paradox, to keep two or more contradictory things in mind at the same time. That's also Freud's definition of sanity. If you can live with a painting that aims to kill you in your sleep and you know it, you are strong. Of course, if you don't know it, you are just stupid and that's not strength—your vanity will sooner or later be revealed.”