An Object of Beauty follows the New York art world climb of Lacey Yeager. She is a charismatic character, yet a very odd one to have emerged from the imagination of Steve Martin. Although Lacey is treated as this book’s main source of fascination, it’s less interesting to look at her point-blank than to look at her while wondering what Martin sees.
One aspect of this novel’s allure is the ambiguity with which Martin frames Lacey’s fierce, outsized ambitions. Is her story meant to be the appreciatively told tale of a canny New York predator? That of a relative innocent whose values change in the presence of vast sums of art-market money? Or that of a stylishly attractive dynamo who, with only minimal irony, recognizes herself in the monstrous goddess that Willem de Kooning painted as Woman I?
Is she an unalloyed opportunist? Or is she as intoxicated with art as she is with the leverage and entree that expertise will bring? Is she stirred by art’s erotic power or just someone who sexually exploits the acquisitive passions of insatiable collectors? Does she share the collectors’ boys’-club competitive spirit (for surely this is a man’s world, at least in the way it is depicted by Martin)? Or is she just a woman who’s inordinately good at manipulating rich, credulous men?
And what line does Lacey cross when she begins understanding that a Renoir painting of a young girl is worth more than one of an old woman, that a Western landscape with five tepees is worth more than the one-tepee version, and that she can start “converting objects of beauty into objects of value”? Whatever boundary that is, An Object of Beauty owes its moral complexity to the fact that Martin has crossed it too.
An Object of Beauty either cannot or will not separate the power of art from the fetishistic, status-driven behavior that the big-ticket art market engenders. The knowingly nuanced descriptions of this behavior are at the book’s real heart. Martin, as notable for his serious art collecting as for so many other things, could not have written so knowingly about this culture without being part of it, however vicariously. How else could he describe Thursday night as “prom night for the smart set” at Chelsea galleries, “a night to be smug, cool, to dress up or dress down, and to bring into focus everything one loves about oneself and make it tangible.” How else would he know that paintings can be collected not only because of the way they look “but because of a winding path that leads a collector to his prey”?
What he may know least well in An Object of Beauty is a living, breathing Lacey. She serves this book more as a convenient abstraction, a way of illustrating its tutorial lessons, than a flesh-and-blood heroine. Martin also adds an only minimally necessary narrator, a watchful but bland art critic named Daniel Franks, and makes him an old friend of Lacey’s who cannot get her out of his head. But this novel does a fine job of appraising Lacey without Daniel’s extra pair of eyes (and extra conscience) to size her up.
Lacey starts at Sotheby’s in the early 1990s, in the equivalent of the mailroom. Soon she is imaginatively working her way up from the basement to the corridors of power. It hardly matters what Daniel thinks of her progress, or even what it is about Lacey that makes her so driven; what really animates this book is Martin’s own sense of how the upward-mobility game is played at galleries, auction houses and art-world watering holes. This book does a wonderfully nostalgic job of capturing the “fresh and clean New York,” so full of new money, beautiful young things and Gatsby-esque promise, that facilitates Lacey’s uphill climb.
As Lacey rises, in very well-delineated steps, to the level of making sizable deals and then aspiring to own a gallery, Martin invests his book with its larger drama: that of the art market’s wild evolution over the course of the last two decades. He writes of a time in New York “when the art world was building offshore like a developing hurricane.” He writes of how collectors could so drastically (if only temporarily) distort the value of the work they collected; he writes of a Banksy-like stunt artist who plays mischievously off those collectors’ fickle tastes. And he writes about how collectors began trying to win the respect of their dealers, reversing the traditional order of things. He describes the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as a collision of the real and surreal that beggared art aficionados’ understanding of either concept.
Although An Object of Beauty is made extremely entertaining by Martin’s cool, caustic insights and fearless willingness to puncture vanity, Lacey eventually becomes more of an obstacle than an asset. The reader need not be told that by the end of the story she will be “nearing 40 and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses” to stop forgiving her. Chilly from the start, she grows ever frostier as the book proceeds, partly because Martin has difficulty translating her sexual abandon to anything beyond “sexual due process.”
An Object of Beauty features 22 reproductions of quirkily varied artworks, from a festive Tissot to a stark Milton to a Warhol Marilyn Monroe. All are ingeniously worked into the narrative in ways that advance the story, underscore Martin’s critical acuity and kindle the collector’s instinct in even the most potentially indifferent reader. It takes that instinct to know what An Object of Beauty is really about.
Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behavior of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired. The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance — a locally approved regulation — to protect service industry staff from kasuhara — the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment.” While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations
There is perhaps no better way to soak up the last of Taipei’s balmy evenings than dining al fresco at La Piada with a sundowner Aperol Spritz and a luxuriant plate of charcuterie. La Piada (義式薄餅) is the brainchild of Milano native William Di Nardo. Tucked into an unassuming apartment complex, fairy lights and wining diners lead the way to this charming slice of laid-back Mediterranean deli culture. Taipei is entirely saturated with Italian cuisine, but La Piada offers something otherwise unseen on the island. Piadina Romagnola: a northern Italian street food classic. These handheld flatbreads are stuffed with cold
From a Brooklyn studio that looks like a cross between a ransacked Toys R Us and a serial killer’s lair, the artist David Henry Nobody Jr is planning the first survey of his career. Held by a headless dummy strung by its heels from the ceiling are a set of photographs from the turn of the century of a then 30-year-old Nobody with the former president of the US. The snapshots are all signed by Donald Trump in gold pen (Nobody supplied the pen). They will be a central piece of the New York artist’s upcoming survey in New York. This
Oct. 14 to Oct. 20 After working above ground for two years, Chang Kui (張桂) entered the Yamamoto coal mine for the first time, age 16. It was 1943, and because many men had joined the war effort, an increasing number of women went underground to take over the physically grueling and dangerous work. “As soon as the carts arrived, I climbed on for the sake of earning money; I didn’t even feel scared,” Chang tells her granddaughter Tai Po-fen (戴伯芬) in The last female miner: The story of Chang Kui (末代女礦工: 張桂故事), which can be found on the Frontline
RSS