that disagreements over matters of perception and perceptions of matter might be reconciled if one quits the business of ornamenting language about them, the press release read for a new hot-shot abstractionist picked up by her gallery. She put down her white wine to take a swig from her aluminum water bottle before swilling the wine.
The young painter ambled about the show, hunched slightly to hear the critic trailing his ear. The painter was drinking mineral water, the critic nothing. A white-shirted waiter came to the sculptor and gestured with the tip of a bottle and she nodded and the waiter topped off her pinot grigio. The waiter was off before the sculptor could remember to say thanks.
“What I’m saying,” the critic was saying, “is that I think it’s really original, what you’re doing, this whole business of resuscitating the anti-retinal.”
If it’s original, how’s it a resuscitation? the sculptor thought to herself, and the painter nodded and asked the critic a question much the same.
“Well, I mean, I think—I think, these trends, you know, today with all this neo-figuration, neo-surrealism… Such a commitment to the mind as yours, that’s been forgotten.”
“I hope it’s clear to you that my paintings are in fact things that demand the eye,” the young man said as he made his way past the sculptor and out of his own show.
—
When the sculpture was unveiled at the civic square, a concrete-tiled plaza fringed by short, runty shrubs and color changing lights, there was a ceremony presided over by the gallerist and the deputy mayor.
Standing in front of the work, Sense II, all the politician could muster was to note that “the job of art is to defy our expectations.” He cut a ribbon that had been suspended between two brassy stanchions. The red polyester fell onto the sculpture, an inlaid strip of metal that read to see.
