F by Daniel Kehlmann

Author:Daniel Kehlmann [Kehlmann, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-8041-9783-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Beauty

“Have you seen Carrière’s new exhibition?”

“Yes, and I’m a bit stumped.”

“Oh?”

“People say he challenges our usual ways of seeing. He says it too. In every art magazine right now. But basically what it boils down to is him admitting that pictures are only pictures, not reality. He’s as proud of this as a child who’s just discovered there is no Easter Bunny.”

“That’s mean.”

“But I really admire him.”

“Quite right, too.”

We both smile. The situation is complicated. In my profession it’s not just a matter of selling paintings—you also have to sell them to the right people. Naturally I have to convince Eliza that her collection needs another Eulenboeck, but at the same time Eliza has to convince me that her collection is the right home for Eulenboeck. There won’t be many more Eulenboecks coming onto the market, and meanwhile the museums have become interested in him, and granted, they pay less, but they can raise the reputation of an artist enormously, which in turn causes auction prices in the secondary market to soar. You have to be careful: if prices rise too precipitously, they soon collapse again, and the result is all the art magazines pronouncing that the market has delivered its verdict, and the name of the artist never recovers. So Eliza has to convince me that she won’t dispose of the painting I’m going to sell her as soon as she can turn a profit on it; she has to convince me that she’s a serious collector, just as I have to convince her that Eulenboeck’s value will not decline in the long run.

But we don’t talk about any of this. We each sit in front of a plate of salad, sip our mineral water, smile a lot, and talk about anything and everything except what it’s actually all about. I’m a good artist’s executor, she’s a good collector, and we both know the game.

So we talk about the terraces in Venice. Eliza has an apartment in Venice with a view of the Grand Canal. I went to visit once and it never stopped raining; mist crawled over the water and the city seemed lethargic, dark, and stagnant. We laugh about the parties at the Biennale, we both think that they’re exhausting and loud and a big effort, but you still have to go, you have no choice. We agree that great beauty makes too many demands: you are helpless in front of it, it’s as if you have to react in some way, do something, respond to it, but it remains mute, and rejects you with sovereign equanimity. This of course leads to Rilke. We talk about his time with Rodin, we talk briefly about Rodin himself, then, it’s unavoidable, we talk about Nietzsche. We order coffee, neither of us has touched our salad, who has an appetite on a day as hot as this? And now, because time is running out, we get around to talking briefly about Eulenboeck.

Difficult, I say. There’s a lot of interest.

She can

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