The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

showed me an orgone box he built for one of his dolls, a lush beauty in shocking pink, but with the white face, and she’s lying on a cot in the box and there’s a mechanism that makes her writhe and move her hand against her crotch. He paid a couple of dozen girls to make videosof their faces as they masturbated to orgasm, and we had a beer and watched as he ran them in a loop against the face of his boxed odalisque. With the accompanying cries and squishy noises, of course.
    An interesting experience. We discussed the faces, whether you can tell acting from feeling, and about what warped desire for exhibitionistic fame would compel obviously middle-class young women to participate in such a project. Bosco said it was because none of them wanted to be president of the United States, which seemed to be the only restriction on behavior nowadays.
    Then we talked about his next project, which involved dust from the 9/11 attacks. All of us living in lower Manhattan were showered with the gray cloud on that day, but Bosco had collected a whole barrel of it, consisting of pulverized buildings, computers, firemen, terrorists, bond traders, etc., and wanted to use it in a project that would piss all over the cult of 9/11 in the most offensive way possible. Most artists nowadays have made their peace with the bourgeoisie, the class from whence they arise and the class that pays their bills, in return for which they supply a little frisson of outrage, usually of a sexual nature, but Bosco still believes in the power of art and thinks that anarchy is the only proper politics for a conscious artist. He considers me a neolithic reactionary and accuses me of Republican sympathies. You’re a fucking fascist, Wilmot, he always says, in everything but the lust for gold and power. You’re like sex without orgasm—sweaty, uncomfortable, expensive, with no payoff. You’re a sellout who never collected the check.
    We’ve been friends for twenty years, ever since the day of the drywall—nice guy, wouldn’t hurt a cockroach, two grown kids, been married for decades. Lives in a big Dutch Colonial house in Montclair, New Jersey, a perfect phony and a happy man.
    And speaking of phony, after I got finished with Bosco I went over to Mark Slade Downtown to see what Slotsky wanted; it waslunchtime and I figured he’d spring for a meal. The girl in black said he’d gone out but she expected him back soon, nice-looking kid, and I thought I recognized her from one of the orgasm clips, although Bosco said that since he collected the vignettes he’s been thinking that every woman between eighteen and forty he sees on the street is one of the ones on the doll’s face.
    Slotsky was showing a kid named Emil Mono, big square tricolored abstracts in the loose dramatic style of Motherwell. One ground color, a blob of another color, and some blobs and streak of a third color, perfectly respectable work, suitable for corporate lobbies, hotel meeting rooms, and the Whitney Biennial. I really have no problem at all with work like this, in most cases a kind of wallpaper, anodyne, meaningless, or rather announcing the fact that meaning no longer inheres in painting.
    Pretty colors, though. I recall once when I was in Europe a dozen or so years ago, in the Prado as a matter of fact, and I got caught in one of the endless corridors they’ve got stuffed with barely distinguishable academic painting, all brownish remakes of Rubens and Murillo, and I felt like I was drowning in sepia. I practically ran out of the place and walked down the Paseo to the Reina Sofía modern art museum and into a cool white room, and there was a Sonia Delaunay that was like a little girl singing on some bright terrace, lovely and fresh, just some watery stripes and numerals and letters, and it cleaned my eye, the way the art needed to have its eye cleaned around the tail end of the nineteenth century. And God bless them all, the nonfiguratives, but I can’t do it myself, I am