Free The Genius by Jesse Kellerman Page A

the end, when only I, my staff, and a handful of the hardest-core booze moochers remained. Nat, having gone behind the front desk for some promotional postcards, tried to intercept Kristjana, but she blew right past him. He then ran to warn me, but by then it was too late: she had taken her position in the middle of the gallery.
    All eyes fell on her. How can you ignore a six-foot Icelandic manic-depressive with a boot-camp hairdo, her mouth sealed with duct tape, wearing a—
    “Is that a straitjacket?” Ruby whispered.
    It was. A red patent-leather one.
    “Asylum, by Jean Paul Gaultier,” Nat whispered.
    We were whispering because we knew that we had all been co-opted into a piece of performance art.
    It didn’t last long. She held her arms up to the sky, arched her back gracefully, and slowly—very, very slowly—began to peel the tape from her face. The sizzle of glue was audible throughout the entire gallery. It hurt to watch. With a flick of her wrist she sent the tape fluttering to the ground. Then she whipped her torso forward and expelled a shockingly large quantity of mucus smack in the middle of my gallery floor, where it sat, glistening, like a frog.
    She turned on her heel and marched out.
    The first person to react was Ruby’s friend Lance. Everyone else was still too stunned to move, but he got up from where he’d been sitting in the corner and ambled toward the loogie, which had begun to send out little drippy green tendrils. From somewhere inside his track jacket he produced a handheld video camera. He switched it on, twisted off the lens cap, and knelt to get a close-up of Kristjana’s latest work.
     
     
     

• 5 •
     
     
    The show was a hit. I got good notices in the trades, including one in
ArtBox
by an old friend who loved nothing more than to swim against the stream, and who I had expected to eviscerate me. The Musée D’Arte Brut, the modern-day outgrowth of Jean Dubuffet’s personal collection, expressed interest in bringing the work over to Lausanne. And somebody must have tipped off the
Times
, because they sent over a reporter—not from Arts but from the metro section.
    I waffled over whether to talk to him. Everyone knows that when it comes to the avant-garde, the
Times
is all but irrelevant; their report on a trend marks the surest sign that said trend has declined and fallen. Furthermore, I worried about how they would spin me. With very little stretching of the truth I could come off as a vulture, feasting off the remains of the poor and disenfranchised.
    In the end, though, I had to agree. Otherwise I had no control over the situation whatsoever; I couldn’t stop them from running the article, magnifying my lack of comment into a self-indictment.
    The same traits that make me a good salesmen make me a good interviewee, and when the article came out, I was pleased to see that I had convinced the journalist we were friends. He called the show “hypnotic” and “unsettling” and printed a large close-up of one of Victor’s Cherubs on the front page of the section. My picture didn’t look too bad, either.
    Irrelevant or not to me, the
Times
carries a certain prestige, particularly in the minds of Culture Climbers. Within days I had gotten several offers far above the ones I’d gotten on opening night. On Marilyn’s advice, I put everyone off until I’d spoken to Kevin Hollister, who she promised would call as soon as he got back from Cap Juluca.
    She didn’t disappoint. Two days later he asked me to lunch at a place on the ground floor of a midtown skyscraper that he owned. The restaurant staff hovered and swirled around him, whisking away his coat as he shucked it, pulling his chair out, draping his lap with a napkin, pressing his cocktail of choice into his hand before he had uttered a word. Throughout this frenzy he appeared not to notice anyone but me, asking how I’d gotten into art, how I’d met Marilyn, and so on. We were seated in a private room, where the