The Wangs vs. the World(44)
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 In a sort of daze, Saina had rewatched the old 60 Minutes piece, which looked hopelessly outdated—the early ’90s might as well have been the ’70s—and tried to comfort herself with an interviewee’s observation about collectors: “The act of spending that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?
Other artists cared about their place in the canon, about color and brushwork, about pushing forward the lines of inquiry that obsessed and impressed their peers. Sometimes Saina pretended to care about all of those things, too, but really all she wanted to do, all she’d ever wanted to do, was to look very closely at the world in a way that resonated. And her show, her last, best show, had done that. She was sure of it. Saina kept the catalog from Look/Look on her desk, a punishment and a reminder, and too often she found herself rereading parts of the introduction that her gallerist had written.
In 2007, while war raged on in Iraq, Wang began to notice something about the photos of civilians and refugees published in mainstream newspapers. They were often composed so that the frame centered on a single, striking young woman. While researching this observation, Wang remembered a photo of the war in Bosnia that she first encountered as a child living in Los Angeles. “I’d been flipping through my mother’s back issues of Vogue,” she recalls, “and then I opened up the L.A. Times and was instantly struck by a beautiful girl in a really chic headscarf. It wasn’t until a moment later that I realized that she was on the back of a truck with a dozen other refugees.” Wang tracked down that older photo, and then spent months poring over published images of America’s wars, going back to Vietnam.
Then, in a daring move, she selected the loveliest of the women—women who might have already perished in the conflicts they were used to illustrate—and, with the aid of Photoshop, excised them from their place in history, transported them to a moody warehouse, and looked at them again through the Vaseline blur of desire. There, the women became all beauty, taking on new roles as the models they might have been, had they the fortune of being born in another place and time.
—New York City, February 2008
What was so bad about that? Her gallerist had issued an apology on her behalf of the “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” sort, but she still couldn’t understand how her show had become the flash point of so much anger. Lately, the only professional interest she’d received was from people who had heard of her fall: A gallerist in Germany who wanted to curate a show of modern-day failures, a filmmaker whose documentary on anti-Semitic fashion designer Jean Lugano’s bid to remake his career had just premiered to some success. The only offer that wasn’t outright insulting came from Xio, the persistent curator of the new Beijing Biennial, who wanted to include Chinese artists living abroad. She’d had a conversation or two with him and been dismayed to learn that gossip of her disgrace had spread all the way to China, though it didn’t seem to change his enthusiasm for her work.
In the end, though, none of it appealed to her. It would never work to try to make something mannered and safe. Pandering to your detractors was even worse than pandering to your collectors.