regarding the entertainment value of rude men
“My doctor told me I’m going to die if I don’t change every single thing about my lifestyle.”
There is some entertainment value in rude men.
This is what I told myself when a photographer and I were sent to do a studio tour and interview with an artist who embeds things in slabs of glass and dates movie stars. The artist’s studio was a massive spread of connecting warehouses deep in a part of Brooklyn that was an industrial hub a century and a half ago. And it did feel like I was being sent there, like I had been dispatched. No trains service this neighborhood, which makes it perfect for famous artists who want to pretend they’re in hiding while inhabiting sprawling brick buildings and employing so many assistants they can’t remember their names.
At the time, I worked for an art auction house that specialized in contemporary art and whose roster of initial investors included European royalty, Russian billionaires, and an artist who had been the star of the Young British Artists cohort in the ’90s (and who had rebranded himself as something of a cultural entrepreneur). The target clientele was the grown children of the one percent, 30-somethings who were raised in sweeping Park Avenue apartments among Degas pastels and Picasso sketches. When I would interview these young collectors for the auction house’s website, they would all sing the same refrain, some variation of, “I just grew up in a family of collectors! My parents were always buying some painting or other. They taught me to invest in what really inspires me, not just what will have good resale value, you know?”
Oh, totally. I know.
The artist was late, and his assistants were neither surprised nor apologetic. “I mean, he definitely knew about this,” one assistant said with a half-shrug. He offered me a seat on a black leather sofa in a lounge area. I assumed this was the lead assistant. Of the half-dozen or so people milling about, he was the only one who spoke, even telling another assistant to get me a bottle of water from a mini-fridge. He also wore a fisherman beanie, which seems significant here, somehow. Then he turned around, walked into a nearby office, and shut the door, leaving me waiting alone. The office was walled with glass; the assistant could see me, and I could see him, now sitting in a desk chair. And so we sat, staring at each other, bored boy-king of the art assistants and bored editorial-adjacent marketing girl.
All the while, the photographer was quietly setting up his equipment. Every time an auction was curated by an important collector or a famous artist, the two of us would tour the collector’s home or the artist’s studio. I did the interview, while he took photos, but we rarely spoke to one another. I admired how invisible he could make himself, how efficiently and unobtrusively he moved from room to room. A person isn’t truly good at their job unless they can do it without anyone knowing they’re even there. Sometimes, he was done with his work before I had finished the interviews, and then he would slip out, completely silent. A few days later, edited images would appear in my inbox. I always assumed he hated me.
The artist finally walked in, carrying a paper lunch sack. He set it down on a table in the lounge area, and pulled out a plain, nonfat Chobani yogurt cup and an absolutely abused-looking banana. He looked at me and said, “My doctor told me I’m going to die if I don’t change every single thing about my lifestyle.”
“You should probably listen to him, then,” I said.
“Did we have an appointment?”
“Yes! I’m from the auction house. We have an interview set for this morning.”
“You’re from where?”
“The auction house.”
“Oh. Why are you interviewing me?”
“Because you donated some pieces for the benefit auction.”
“Which?”
“The benefit auction you helped organize. For the non-profit art space… that you founded and run.”
“But why are you interviewing me?”
“It’s part of the editorial package of the marketing for the auction.”
“But what do you even need to know?”
Then, he intentionally misunderstood every question I asked with increased annoyance. When I asked about the show at the art space he founded that was mid-installation, he pretended not to know what I was talking about. When I asked him about the emerging artist incubator program he founded, he pretended not to be able to name a single member of the new cohort. Eventually, I was physically tired and ended the interview. I hope this is not a disappointing ending. Truthfully, this was about eight years ago, and I no longer have the transcript of the interview saved anywhere.
A few months after I visited the artist’s studio, rumors began circulating that the auction house would be acquired by a larger German organization. During lunch, I often went on hour-long walks that took me far from the office. The farther I walked, the emptier my brain felt. It always seemed necessary to fully empty my brain once a day. Still does. On one such walk, as far from the office as I had ever let myself wander before I could be missed, I turned a corner and came face to face with the auction house’s Etonian founder. He was smoking furiously and engaged in a heated phone call. He locked eyes with me, turned, and ran.
The auction house eventually went under, so none of the long-form profiles I wrote as part of my job exist anywhere else online. I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig up the studio tour I put together. In it, the artist tells me, “I don’t think we’re necessarily cognizant of what’s happening to our species now, with computers and new material sciences and those things extrapolated into medicine and transportation and analysis of how the brain works. Maybe there’s a way to help save the world.”
At the party celebrating the launch of the auction, the artist took off his pants and tucked his dick between his legs, a moment that was captured by the Guest of a Guest photographer in attendance.