SEVEN DAYS Read Free Page B

it?”
    “The women?” she said.
    “It's all women in this room.”
    “Oh yeah.”
    Eventually, she saw which painting he was referring to. There were five women in the foreground, looking somewhat like caricatures. The women on the right were disintegrating and had particularly ugly faces, or at least so she thought. Their bodies were deformed. Here she saw the straight lines that she had recently been telling herself didn't belong in art.
    “It's ok-ay,” Judy said, not wanting to badmouth a Picasso.
    Mark laughed.
    “I think you would have liked it even less if he had finished it,” he said.
    “What makes you think it's not finished?” Judy asked.
    “What makes you think it is?” Mark said.
    They were in the next room, and the next, and the next and Judy wished that she didn't have somewhere to go tonight after all. She'd always looked forward to dinner with Peter, but now she was dreading having to leave the gallery. Tonight, she had to admit, she would have preferred to hang out with Mark, even if it was just to watch him stack books.
    She imagined herself helping him to stack shelves, just to be near him like this for a while longer. She imagined them closing up the shop when the gallery closed for the evening. She imaged him locking the door, with the two of them still inside the shop, turning off the lights, swiping books and posters from the display table.
    Back in reality, canvasses gave way to installations as they approached the end of the exhibition. In one room, there was nothing but a light bulb casting a sterile glow on everyone below. People were staring up at it with their mouths open. Judy wanted to lift their bottom jaws to snap their mouths shut.
    “It's only a light bulb,” she wanted to remind them.
    As she was pulled from that room into another she read something about how the bulb was unadorned by shade or colour. Not only that but it illuminated the spectators in such a harsh way that they too were exposed in all their 'beautiful imperfections'.
    I've seen better in my living room, she thought, but she kept it to herself.
    There was another artwork by the same artist in the next room. This time it was a red, life-size, wax sculpture of a bulbous, naked woman. She was visible from her torso down to her ankles, because she was in fact a giant candle. Her head, shoulders and bust had melted and collected at her feet.
    “People are going to come to see this,” Judy said, “and by the time they get here it'll be gone.”
    It was titled: Naked Flame Meets Old Flame.
    “Here it is,” Mark said, attempting to keep his grin under wraps.
    It was an empty room, aside from the dozen or so men and women who looked as perplexed as Judy did. The walls were starkly white, illuminated by spotlights attached to what looked like scaffolding from a building site that was lashed together with warning tape. The lights appeared to pick out specific areas of the bare walls, making it look as though somebody had stolen half of the exhibition. Here and there, she saw empty frames. No glass, no canvas, no painting. Only ornate, illuminated, bronze frames. Some of them were on the walls, but others were suspended from the metal poles by clear wires, so that they seemed to hover in space.
    “Where are the pictures?” Judy said.
    “There are no pictures,” Mark said.
    “It's crazy,” said Judy and suddenly burst out laughing.
    Mark appraised her with those deep, dark eyes. He neither agreed nor disagreed with her. He only seemed interested in her reaction.
    “The artist was asked to create something that represented nakedness. This is what she felt. Why not?”
    “Because it's not art,” Judy said, incredulous. “It's some dirty, old scaffolding from a building site.”
    “That's what you see,” Mark said, “and that's interesting.”
    “What do you see?” she asked.
    “The scaffolding suggests that something was about to be created, a façade of some sort, but it didn't happen. Instead, we're