The Wangs vs. the World (18 page)

Saina still couldn’t see what was so offensive about this show when none of her others had raised any eyebrows. There had been no
Big Issue
screeds about the exploitation of the homeless in response to her Basel project, no Chinese groups hounded her with photos of dead Tiananmen Square protesters. And yet, even as she’d been supervising the hanging of this fourth show, one of the handlers had turned to her and said, “Oh boy, they’re gonna get good and pissed about this one.” He’d been holding the bottom of a 48 x 72 canvas with a blowup of a stunning young Palestinian refugee in a flower-print headscarf whom Saina had removed from a
Time
photo that also included armed Israeli soldiers and, with the assistance of Photoshop, placed on a seat in a beautifully lit studio. The catalog for the show was printed like a fashion lookbook, with sans serif text in the bottom right corner: “Soraya is wearing the
Conqueror
scarf in
Beit Hanoun.
Cotton-rayon, 4' x 4'. $1,200. Delivery 7/08.”

“So, what do you think?” asked Billy. “They’re talking cover story!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Or if it would really make sense for me right now. I don’t know if I want to be memorialized as a cautionary tale. Anyways, I’ve already been a cover story.”

“The
Village Voice,
” he said, dismissively.

“It was horrible.”

Just remembering it gave Saina a cold feeling. The tabloid used a photo of her from that first opening for
Made in China,
where she was dressed in a ridiculous confection of a dress and laughing, mouth wide, eyes squeezed shut. The headline type was giant—
EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES?
—and the entire piece pilloried Saina, saying she was an insensitive, opportunistic rich girl who preyed on the public’s feelings and insulted the fine tradition of conceptual art that was born in glory with the Dadaist movement and died an ignoble death at her hands. She had already sold her apartment by then, but even if she hadn’t, just seeing her once-happy face screaming out from every battered red kiosk and strewn across coffee-shop floors would have been enough to send her slinking out of the city, a starving alley cat running from a gang of murderous children.

“Garbage. Anyways, anyways, I wrote that
first
story.” He leaned forward, urgent. “
That
was the one.”

It felt like a million years ago. Another world. Another life. Saina looked at him. “Are you trying to say that you made me, Billy?” This was one thing she’d always been able to do—say the things that might have been better left unsaid.

He was still for a moment, caught. “‘Made you’ is a little strong, but, yeah, that story helped. You know it did. And I think this one will be good for you, too—don’t you want to speak up for yourself?”

Billy had grown up. Everyone did. He wasn’t the same ambitious innocent who revered the esoteric, who thought that names like Deleuze and Guattari were passwords to a different life, spells that could glamour away a drab past. When she met him, he had read all of Foucault but had never cracked Shakespeare; he knew about
Minotaure
magazine but couldn’t name the countries involved in World War II. He’d entered her world thinking that it was a magical place, and somewhere along the way he’d become a fixture.

Saina knew exactly the kind of article that he was planning to write. It would contain a shocked series of references to her barely controversial past, an ironic look at her current state of singular domesticity, a supposedly neutral summary of the protests, a sidebar on what Grayson was doing now, with maybe a tiny inset of his chaotic canvas of her in chola mufti, rendered in splashy, ’80s-style primary colors.

But Saina was still too raw to put herself back into the public eye like that, naked, without a new body of work to back her up. The whole time she had been up here, she hadn’t made a thing. Somehow, in all the attendant commotion and loss, the thing itself, the eternal, singular piece of art, had gotten away from her. What she didn’t want to say to herself was this: Saina couldn’t create art without spectacle, and spectacle, by its very nature, had to be witnessed. Not for the first time she wished that she had never sold her Manhattan apartment, never fled to Helios.

“You know, I could always do a write-around.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you don’t interview the person. I mean, I could describe this, where you are, what we talked about, even if you don’t participate in the story.”

Was Billy threatening her?

“Speaking of, how did you find out where I was?”

He ignored the question and pressed on. “I could do it, but I don’t want to. I want you to be on board. Saina, this is a
cover
for
New York
mag—it’s huge! Look, I could set up a sort of summit, you could meet with some of the protesters, and people are going to look at you differently now, with everything going on with your family and stuff.”

“Billy, you’re freaking me out. How did you know about that?”

“I ran into your ex. He was wasted.”

Saina felt a flash of cold. Even if Grayson didn’t care about her heart, she thought he’d at least want to protect her privacy. Or, failing that, her physical safety.

“And he just
told
you? What, did he program the directions into your phone and give you a ride to the train station, too?”

“Hey.” Billy sprang up and gripped her arms, a liquid look of concern in his eyes.
Fake,
Saina reminded herself. It was probably fake. Billy was like those serpent-tongued eunuchs who slunk around royal courts, trading on scraps of gossip. “I just want to help you. I know I’m a reporter, not a critic, but I am really just a fan. I mean it. I think you’re going to be up there with, like, Marina Abramović someday. Those protesters are crazy.”

“You’d think I was creating false images of Mohammed and putting
him
in a flowery headscarf, ” she said, glad even for this scrap of sympathy.

“That’s what America likes to do to its successes, right? Eat them up and spit them out?”

Saina laughed. “Exactly. I’m definitely in the being spit out phase.”

“But it means that you’re someone to be taken seriously. Why else would they want to give you a cover?”

“Because my life is an art world soap opera.” They stared at each other for a moment. “Did you . . . did you pay him or something?”

“Would that have worked?”

“Well, apparently he was willing to sell me out for nothing, so cash could only have sped up the process.”

“Does he need it?”

Saina stopped herself. Of course. Billy was just trying to get his story. In a way, she didn’t even fault him—she was a commodity in his eyes, their connection a stock that had yielded excellent dividends in the past and now promised to pay off even more if he could persuade it to split.

“Billy, I’m tired. And you have to catch the seven-thirty train. I’ll call a cab. There are only two in town, so it’ll probably take a while for one of them to get here.”

“Hey, no, no, no. I thought we were having a good talk, right?”

She wanted to wound him. Who was he to insinuate himself into her life, to ambush her here where she should be safe, to suggest that he’d had anything to do with the life that she’d made?

“I never thought you’d end up just being a paparazzo, Billy.”

She said it with as much nonchalance as she could muster. It worked. She could tell. He froze and raised one eyebrow as high as it would go. He was a lot bigger than she was, Saina realized. He was skinny, and he always slouched, but he was at least six feet tall with broad shoulders and big, veined hands. His face was thicker now—too much happy-hour beer and midnight melted cheese. He didn’t feel like a boy anymore. Saina wondered if she should be scared.
Would Billy hurt her?

“Did your former fiancé tell you that he’s getting married?”

No. Billy wouldn’t hurt her. He’d destroy her.

Or try to. Once she’d gritted out her bravest smile and boldest lie, assuring him that she knew everything, once he’d left, disappointed, and she’d locked the door and prepared to crumble, to let herself just wash away, Saina found, instead, that she felt blank. A lightness. A widening space inside that was neither positive nor negative. She remembered the weeks after Grayson had first left her, when she sat straight up in bed every morning at four, heart racing, knowing only that something bad, bad, unutterably bad had happened. This already felt different.

Her only thought was embarrassing. It was this:
But . . . Sabrina’s not an artist!

Because how could Grayson have loved her, Saina, for all the reasons he said he did if he could just turn around and love Sabrina instead? She pictured him calling his new wife’s jewelry
art
and felt sick at the lie of it all.

Wife.

Saina focused back on that space. Dark, quiet, internal. It expanded and buoyed her heart up so that it could not sink again, like it had done once before. She made herself remember, instead, a road trip they took to a friend’s wedding, not far from where she was now. The radio played a cheerful little tune and then the host announced that futures were looking good. Grayson cocked his head and looked at her, cute, saying, “Futures? I thought there was only one.” So she’d explained it to him again, trying to remember the way her father had untangled the world of options and futures and puts and shares for her, and for the third time, he’d nodded and said that he understood. Finally, though, she realized that he just liked to hear himself voice confusion, liked to think of himself as an artist who couldn’t be expected to understand base financial matters. Her suspicion was confirmed when she heard him again at the wedding itself, saying to a group of friends who were talking about an upcoming IPO, “How can people buy something that doesn’t exist?” and shaking his head sagely at the wonder of it all.

Your
clubscapes
don’t really exist, she had wanted to say. They’re a bunch of things that are supposed to make a statement about another thing. Your collectors are buying a series of symbols because critics have conferred meaning upon them. It’s the same damn thing as buying a piece of paper that the banks say represent a group of homeowners’ individual promises to pay back their mortgages. Wasn’t that abstraction the beautiful thing about what they did? Wasn’t that what made it different from painting a house or welding a car? Different from staging a kid’s birthday party or serving a meal in a restaurant? From making a fucking ring?

The things we agree to call art are the shamanic totems of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing. Saina knew it was nothing, and yet she kept on doing it. Grayson thought it was everything, and somehow that made him . . . what? Better? More successful? Worse? Stupider? More self-delusional?

In a way, finance was even better than art. It was nothing but an expression of potential, of power, of our present moment in time, and existed only because a group of people collectively agreed that it should exist. Out of nothing but a shared conviction was born a system that could run the world. It was beautiful and terrible. Saina thought that she and her father would probably see eye to eye on this, if they were ever able to have a conversation like it without arguing.

Saina had decided that she was going to be an artist when she was in junior high. It was because of a story that Morley Safer did. In Saina’s mind, he was a sort of cross between Peter Falk’s Columbo and Walter Cronkite, and the story had a hint of murder mystery to it. She even remembered the title: “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” Portentous, like it should be followed by an ominous chord progression. Safer had focused his skeptical eye on Jeff Koons. The trio of floating basketballs, the vacuum cleaner, they had all felt like revelations to her.
I can make anything art,
she’d thought then, not realizing that Safer was producing a takedown of the contemporary art world.

Fifteen years later, she’d still felt the same way. Until now.

A week ago, lost in a Grayson Google loop, Saina found a brief mention in
Art in America
saying that his last piece had sold for half a million dollars—it was an entire order of magnitude greater than any of his past sales.
He’s doing better without me,
she’d thought. In a sort of daze, Saina had rewatched the old
60 Minutes
piece, which looked hopelessly outdated—the early ’90s might as well have been the ’70s—and tried to comfort herself with an interviewee’s observation about collectors: “The act of spending that money on an object makes them feel like they are collaborating on the creation of the art history of their time.” That was why. Grayson gave good artist. He was tortured and handsome and unpredictable, willing to hold forth for hours on the nature of beauty and creation.

Koons, it turned out, had been a commodities trader before he became an artist. It all seemed so appropriate somehow. Maybe all modern art was the strike of beauty against wealth, the artists mocking the collectors for their vain attempt to purchase the inimitable spirit of the artist. But what if you were cursed with both?

Saina wondered why she’d ever stopped watching
60 Minutes.
Would her life make more sense now if she’d continued to see the world through Morley Safer’s eyes, if every week still ended and began again with that ticking stopwatch?

All I wanted,
Saina thought,
was to make someone feel something.
Money can’t do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to the emotions—you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can’t sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn’t have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something—you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing? Or was a portfolio just a portfolio no matter whether the investments it held were financial or artistic?