Last Night in Montreal Read Free

quieter voice, “is that the pictures then sell for up to eighteen thousand apiece. Eighteen thousand dollars . For a photograph of a guy with a hundred or so flies on his skin. All he’s doing is sitting there in a G-string, with flies, staring off into space, and he’s considered an artist. He’s considered an artist .”
    “Okay,” said Geneviève, “he’s considered an artist. And? Why would that bother you?” She was sitting across from him at the café table with an incredulous look on her face. He had been lingering at the Third Cup Café with Geneviève and Thomas for years now, discussing art and their Brooklyn neighborhood and the meaning of life, but it had been some months since he’d spoken at all passionately on any one of these subjects.
    “It’s the word, I guess.” He was silent for a moment. Thomas had put down his magazine. “Yeah, it’s the word. Artist is the word we use for Chopin, for Handel, for Van Gogh, for Hemingway, these men whose art required a lifetime and unprecedented talent and blood and sweat, these men whose art eventually rendered them dead or insane or alcoholic or all of the above, and we use this same word, artist, for a guy who smears honey on his skin and then sits around till some flies show up and then gets his picture taken and makes eighteen thousand dollars for his efforts. If he were mentally ill and did the same thing, you’d lock him up. But because he issues a statement saying that sitting there covered in flies is an act of, of subversion against the, I don’t know, some kind of political statement against Chinese communism or Western capitalism or whatever, you call him an artist. And they’re all like that. Every single so-called artist at this so-called gallery I get paid to stand around in. There’s this other guy who dances naked around his tripod with the camera on a timer, and it’s supposed to represent, I don’t know, his African heritage or his joie de vif, and . . . ”
    “Joie de vivre,” said Geneviève.
    “Whatever.” He used a coffee-stained napkin to blot sweat from his forehead. “He’s just a blurred naked guy.”
    “Maybe you just don’t get it,” said Geneviève helpfully.
    “Jesus—” said Thomas, but Eli cut him off.
    “No, she’s right. I don’t get it. I work in a gallery, I’m supposed to sell this shit, which I consider the work of frauds, I actually do sell this shit, which clearly makes me a fraud, and I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t believe we should be calling it art.”
    “Then what is art?” Geneviève asked. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s eleven A.M. ; we can have this figured out by lunchtime.”
    “Look, I’m not saying I know,” Eli said. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I just think you have to do more than take your clothes off in front of a camera. I think you have to have some talent, not just a clever conceptual idea. I think you have to actually create something. They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins. I’m not claiming to know the answer here.”
    This quieted Geneviève—she only liked arguing with people who were willing to claim that they did know the answer, for the sheer pleasure of tackling them. At a loss, she got up and went to the counter for a coffee refill.
    “And this is what’s been bothering you lately?” Thomas asked while she was gone. “You’ve been a little off.”
    “I don’t know. It’s not just the artists in the gallery. They’re only part of it. I got a letter from my brother the other day.”
    “Zed?”
    “He’s the only one I have.”
    “I haven’t seen him around in forever. Where is he these days?”
    “Africa somewhere. Working at an orphanage. Before that he was building a school in some village in Peru. In between he went hitchhiking in Israel. And the thing with