Victorian painter.  Son of a London piano maker.  Befriended by Lord and Lady Holland on a trip to Italy.  Admired monumental art, like the Elgin marbles. 



The Parthenon marbles, brought back to England by Lord Elgin and unlikely to be returned to Greece anytime soon.  You can't tell from this angle how the figures form part of the frieze of the temple pediment.

I can't tell you how many collectors I've visited (and I reference here no one living) whose taste was exquisite in their heyday but whose eye grew dim in old age.  I mean, you'd walk into an apartment, say, in the West Village, full of Duncan Fyfe and Hudson River School paintings of wooded vistas and magnificent sunrises -- The Delaware Water Gap, Frederick Church, that sort of thing -- and by the time you got upstairs the Paul Cadmus nudes were mixed in with framed naughty postcards signed by pornstars.  Tom of Finland prints in the bathroom, and not meant ironically.  Or you'd visit a condo in Boca Raton with Dubuffet in the dininig room and Barnett Newman in the living room and puppies with giant sad eyes in the bedroom.

I mean, is it your eyes or your pocketbook?  Some of them would complain about how expensive everything had gotten, especially the contemporary collectors, and you'd realize they'd been buying from the artists when the artists were broke and unknown, and now both of them were affluent (or the artist was dead -- even better) and the collector was no longer collecting but getting skin cancer and looking at death up close and entertaining visits by experts from Sotheby's and Christies like an ageing courtesan.

Now, if this follows, what I was thinking this morning is what I said yesterday to T., as we were lamenting the state of the world, and art, and irony -- "I've worked so hard," I began.

"Irony is dead," he explained, without letting me finish. 

"Along, presumably, with narrative," I added, going along with him.

"Literature's in a rococo phase," he answered, as if to say I was right, but not exactly. 

I was not sure what he meant, but I wanted to make it about me and tried to steer the subject back in that direction.

"I've worked so hard," I began again, thinking more of life than of writing but including that too, "I've worked so hard at being mediocre."

"That's not true," he answered, and I sighed with relief. 

"You just have to --" he continued, and at that moment the phone receiver filled with an ocean roaring,  as though transformed without warning into a giant seashell.  Or a Boze seashell with amazing bass resonance.  I could not hear what he was trying to say, even though it was probably constructive and meant to cheer me up.

No, I felt like one of those aged lovers of art -- that I had loved and pursued beauty with a radical wisdom and a daring eye in my youth, but I had squandered my discretionary income, I was past my prime now, I was old and thinking and working small, I had gotten lazy, I was content with tchotches and kitsch.  I wasn't pushing for the big idea anymore, I wasn't trying hard enough.

"Well you know," I said, having to raise my defense and my voice over all that white noise, "it all ends for me in an ashram in India.  I shave my head, I wear orange, and with any luck I slip into a constant state of Samadhi.  Possessionless, unattached, all forms of expression cast aside --"

"Stop," T. commanded.  Apparently I had been babbling.

"The strike is over," he reminded me.  "So you, like many other people there, will get busy again."

"Do you think?"

"Yes.  And you've had too much Diet Coke."