The Wangs vs. the World(42)
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 Abramovi? someday. Those protesters are crazy.”