The Curator

‍Sometime Tomorrow 

The gallery was empty. Impossibly white walls and luminous lights. In the center of the showroom was a stand with a tall empty glass except for a fly. It twirled around crawling on the glass ceiling. Next to the glass was a timer that counted down from twenty-four hours. The life expectancy of a fly. The titled piece, twenty hours only, and the small crowd sauntered in and their eyes magnified inside the glass as their eyes watched the fly’s gradual decline. The fly swirled and eventually lost altitude, landing on the cold marble its legs curling and the tiniest twitch was no more. There was an audible ugh in the crowd and the lights grew dim and eventually everyone made their way out.  It was the type of show that would cost a gallery its reputation and make the doors closed for good. The Curator knew the risk but the reward revealed itself one morning when the street sweeper was almost caught up in the crowd of protestors. When the Curator saw the sign long live the experimental fly he almost choked swallowing the unsweetened black coffee. The protestors left piles of trash in front of the gallery and the weather was too cold for the flies in the natural world to crawl and inhabit the space. The street sweeper threatened to quit. The next day they were still there, and the Curator felt a tension headache intertwined with the symptoms of a stroke, his body aging years into each day. 

The protestors camped outside, a few of them were entomologists from the university. The Curator began to grow enraged, to run a gallery was an art in itself and the arts were always underfunded and under appreciated. He looked at their mostly young faces and realized they grew up in an era of artistic drought. The abstract was too impalpable; the Curator did not call the police,  he handed out flyers for the next show. The show would run for months, and would be filled with traditional paintings, something the protestors and their childhood finger painting recollection would enjoy and recognize as real. 

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The moth vs the butterfly: perceptions of aesthetics. 

The paintings were of wings under a microscope. Chromatic colors and geometric shapes filled the room. The Curator walked through the room pleased with himself, life was art and under the microscope was another layer of art in itself. Layers of life and aesthetic abundance. The show was mainly paintings and mixed media, fibrous fabric with the wings, in bold letters, what was supposed to display do not touch, was replaced with do not break. The Curator looked for the faces of the protestors, but the revelers were gone. At the center of the gallery was the biggest piece that was listed for a small six-figure sum. Enough to keep the operation running through the winter. The patrons, the frequent buyers, wanted to see more risk. Something to shock their own personal collection. The Curator walked and listened and read the emails and voicemails. Spring was coming. The Curator needed an opening that kept up and increased the foot traffic in the showroom. He searched the universities and local artists and found one that he wanted to fly in from Miami. No locals, they were probably aware of the protests anyway. 

The artist walked in the room in tattered jeans and an old polyester jacket. The Curator shook their hand and they began to pace the gallery together. “I live on a commune on a farm, I paint about the area where I live. The animals, the plants, the people.” The Curator looked at the paintings and felt a sense of joy, each painting was like a depraved garden of eden. The Curator handed them a contract and after a week the final art pieces were shipped in. The artist left produce and a thank you card. 

It was a monochrome start, black and white and endless gray. The artist walked and talked with the crowd, the largest so far in the gallery's history. “My family escaped from Cuba and came to Miami. They wanted to build the American way of life and pass it on to their children. Then the hurricane came, a destruction not even seen at home.My mother when trying to piece everything back into place in the rubble found my stash of nude male models and my letters and poems to these men. She was a Catholic, and I was hiding my sexuality. She told me in the midst of this hurricane and widespread destruction, that I was “unnatural” and an "abomination".  All around us was nature, you see my mother like most people thought of nature only through the lens of beauty. All my work eventually turns, hmm, ugly. People always want one side to my work, they want to slice it into a way that they can consume the half that suits them. Beauty is not just one-sided. Tonight I want us to look at everything and see beyond the lens of black, white, gray color ugly beautiful and to just exist with the art, because existence is beautiful. 

The Curator was engaging with the artist's speech but then he watched in horror as the artist started to strip layer by layer their clothes. The artist was down to their jeans, then they took those off and their underwear. Their back was tattooed with blades of grass with every blade broken somewhere along the shaft. Just end the madness. The voice was like a jolt of thunder roaring down the Curator’s spine. He went to the back room and without really processing his actions, he pulled the fire alarm. The noise was loud and disruptive, and then the sound like a faucet came on, and the sprinklers started spraying. The Curator ran back into the showroom and saw most of the crowd leaving and then saw the paintings and the colors fading from the canvases. The curator watched in horror as the painter started to take the water in  handfuls, bathing themselves. Then the painter  took out a paint brush and used it  as an eraser, painting over the work from end to a new beginning. “Like the hurricane,” the painter mumbles, “with its high winds and endless rain that swallowed trees, buildings, drowned the barrier islands, drowned the unevacuated souls. New life always blooms from pain, gain, rain.” The painter kept repeating the rhyme, pain gain rain. The Curator felt his chest compress and saw the audience outside the window recording and laughing and smiling. He walked into the backroom and turned off the showroom lights.

The street sweeper was inside and mopping the stained walls and floors, with its drained colors . An ambulance had been called and the painter, in agony and shock, was taken to the hospital. There was a flat fee to pay them, as well as the medical bills,and the Curator feared lawsuits The entire thing was captured on CCTV. The Curator replayed it until the images were embedded into his dreams. Miraculously there were still a few pieces at the front of the gallery  that were able to be salvaged. Destruction became the selling point of the impromptu performance. The clips from the scene had circulated into a pulse of interest and there was a buzz floating about the gallery, where art and performance clashed. That was the artistic misinterpretation that was now misinformation: a gallery with open performances. 

Reinvention was required for relevancy. Critics and all were intrigued. the Curator who always bowed to pressure for validation was the crown jewel. There was a line of critique that the words were sewed into his skin and the blood would not stop, the wound would not heal: just another conventional art show with a mishap. The Curator searched online and found that the critic was born in a year that started with two. A young critical brat, he thought to himself, he threw the phone and didn’t care if it shattered. He thought of how the phone and a community of screens raised this critic, ipads were  aunties and uncles, phones were parents. The Curator knows that the critic  has seen more screens than the eyes of their parents, and screens replaced eyes and real life. Who was this person raised by the algorithm of machines to give such command. The Curator went back behind his desk and searched the online forums, he went and looked through the popular anime artists until he came across the forgotten: an artist from the nineties, lost in the dotcom bubble, buried under recessions. In his veins the Curator felt the impulse of revival. 

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When the tree falls, there is no forest left to hear it.

There were no paintings, no canvases, no tapestry, no wood carvings, Artistic analog was out and the young critic was invited to the opening. The showroom was filled with a pyramid of televisions and a rollercoaster that swirled around the showroom, playland of the future was a rough translation. The runtime of the animation was a loop of twenty-four minutes, the character was an artist that drew animatronics to live and was running from the authorities; it was the type of children’s show that could have been picked up but was put down. No risk in a down market, but the Curator felt the reward of watching everyone’s faces. The Curator saw the critic in the corner, and saw that they looked older than their online  photo, still he wanted to be the bartender to get a chance to ID the Critic and tell her he was bad at math and two-thousand and anything wasn’t old enough for drinking, ask your parents. The atmosphere of imagination ran while for the Curator once he was having fun. 

The budget for the monthly sales came in and the Curator was really bad at math. The accountant wanted to throw the spreadsheets at him, paintings sell, and young people have no money in this economy. The crowd was younger and the social media pages swelled with more followers but the books were stagnant, the sales weren’t even a pinch to the margins. The gallery had its own economy of support, from the streetsweeper to the Curator’s mother in the nice upstate nursing home. He looked outside the storefront window and saw the newer high rises and that the city was rapidly changing before everyone’s eyes. Everyone could see that change carried a swelling price tag. The Curator hired an intern to manage the online presence and to set up an online merchandise line, and he hired a consultant to find him newer artists; he needed the next opening to be commercial and a critical success. He told this to the consultant, a fellow cohort from his grad school, and she simply responded, “everyone says that Robert, even you.” 

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Tomorrow you’ll forget. 

Opening night every bulb is replaced in the gallery showroom and the wine and cheese flows endlessly. The Curator is lactose intolerant and does not drink. He mingles in the crowd and shakes a few hands and does a few nods, otherwise, he is invisible. The exhibit is by a native Navajo woman from New Mexico Yazzie. Her show was all tapestry and painting and ceramic clay. She was gifted with form and the eye for color, something in her DNA burst a genealogical kaleidoscope, but she was not there at the opening. Twenty-four fours before she’d emailed him how excited she was to have her first show in New York City, what a dream it was, but now she was absent from her own dream. The Curator looked at a painting of a young woman who looked like the artist, the same length black hair and dark eyes. It was an homage to her missing sister, a runaway who was found weeks later in a river. Case unsolved. A slice of my body was a piece that had the most interest, it was a painting filled with yarn and the artist's hair.  Turquoise and black colors swirl into a dimension of an endless center. 

The artist was missing from the show and was now missing fifty hours, unanswered calls and emails, it was only when the Curator browsed online that he saw the discourse from New Mexico. Her husband was missing and the children were afraid and with their grandparents. He leaned back in the chair and turned off the computer. The showroom was black. He put on a pair of white silk gloves and ran his fingers across the painting with the swirl of colors glowing, feeling the thread mark of her hair.

The feminists came and mounted the word femicide in red spray paint on the showroom window. They wanted the artwork to be returned to New Mexico, to the Navajo tribe, no sales, no funds, the art should be returned, they chanted. They were growing in numbers and the soon extended members of the family came. The Curator was appalled, the commission was low but the price was now higher for Yazzie’s work. The bid for the dead was higher than for the living. He went to the basement to the storage room.. The Curator thought, to run a gallery in the city and stay afloat required sacrifice, it required a sacrifice and the work was working beyond the grave. 

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Paradise is Patented 

Nudity was always a risk, but that risk could be rewarding, the human body was always in vogue to be showcased. At the exhibit in the center of the showroom was a cellist, the artist as well, who had long braids that reached the marble tile, the braids with magnolias and cherry blossoms, the springtime colors blooming just outside.  The paintings were of various Eves. Eves from Adisa, Africa, Europe, the past and future, and Eves from Mars. All Eves without Adam, Eves with Lilith. Creation be damned. The snake’s eyes were hidden in some pieces. Trite someone pointed out, and the Curator twirled his glass of water and felt nothing. He was happy for normalcy if art could ever be normal. Living wasn’t normal, living as himself was not normal. He bought one of the paintings  to be shipped upstate to his mother, whose mind was being lost to dementia. His mother said what he made he could not eat from, and in a way she was right, his work hidden and destroyed was not commercial but he was doing something, he was doing the art of living as she lay dying unaware of who she was and what she’d created. 

Nine minutes before the train came, the doors to the showroom locked. The Spring weather was still cold, still lacking the hope of warmth and a reprieve from the coldness. He saw a man thrown to the concrete. The street musicians paused their music, except the saxophone player who went deeper with the base from a pain in the pits of his lungs. The Curator fixed his glasses and saw past the spreading crowd; a fare evader was being reprimanded, or worse. The officers were losing their patience, he was becoming belligerent, the man dressed in black and brown tattered leather, sankofa gold his loc’d hair tied in a bandana. The Curator went to the officers showing his credit card, I’ll pay the fare. That’s not the point, one of them said. The point was power, this the Curtator did not say. 

The fare evader dashed away and ran out the subway, and the officers gave up. The Curator with determination kept moving, he knew that face, those eyes, that style. He ran down the street, the bridges in the background, the lights so endless, he’d dropped his glasses but he knew the alley, he knew the spot. He walked the five or so blocks until he came across that alley with the pungent smell, the shattered glass on the pavement, the spray painted symbols, and there he was, slumped down in the dark. Noah Garballetto. The Curator went back to his impulse towards reemergence, or was it refinement. That was his art in grad school, refining everything around him. He loved the idea that he had the power to kill neo-expressionism, and shock it back into a boomerang or raw primitivism that let no one mention the word postcolonial within a ten mile radius of his eardrop. The contemporary was dead, and Noah was proving it. He was on the ground humming and in a state of near dissociation. The Curator snooped down and looked at him and picked up the pipe that fell from Noah’s pocket. It's empty, he said. Noah’s eyes flickered a little and the Curator felt like he was watching the last of the lifeforce in his dear friend exit his now frail body. Is this what you love more than art? Is this what you loved more than me? He threw it against the wall and watched it shattered and the noise echoed in the alleyway. Noah jumped and chased after the pieces. The Curator felt a rage, he wanted to laugh, to scream, he thought of their late nights together painting on canvases, on their bodies how it seemed that they had something that would blossom. It was Noah’s early fame that had separated them, sliced them until Noah was no longer in demand, and the art school fees and debt drove his mother to put him out. The brute rawness of not making it, or worse making it and falling off the unstable ladder of success. Come back, it doesn’t have to be to me, I can represent you, bring you back from this.

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Reemergence 

The Curator thought of the note the cellist artist played, the garden paradise and the lonely Eve, and how he too was  lonely., He wanted the partner that he’d lost, the paradise that he’d lost, the paradise that he did not know that he had. He leaned in and kissed Noah in the urine stained alleyway with the smell of heavy metal and street art. Love was an artform.

The Curator became a lover and a babysitter, it takes that when you love someone. But he also had a gallery to run and September was a critical month. The past few months it had been a task to ensure the artist stayed alive for the show. There would be many critics and those in their circles, Reemergence was the show’s headlining title. The showroom grew packed and the Curator felt a sense of dread, his mind and fingers numb. Stephanie the consultant stepped into the office. This is good, she said looking outside the showroom, but why did you bring him back? You know what happened the last time. He ignored her, adjusted his glasses and pretended to be stapling paperwork. There won’t be another episode, was all he muttered. He was happy and unhappy to have someone from the past who shared his sense of nervousness of what happened in the final year of their thesis. There was an encrypted line of text that came through, a silent bidding for Noah’s work. The values reached the millions and the Curator felt his spine grow two inches, Another message came from an unknown number, he’s crashing out. he Curator read it so fast he misread it as cashing out. The showroom’s volume was low and he heard a man screaming. The Curator glanced at Stephanie and when they stepped outside they saw Noah, Noah the Curator’s love who thought the trees cried at the concrete, who felt nothing should be purposed to the hands of the other, Noah who was crashing out into psychosis and had to be restrained. The Curator had to chase him back to the alleyway where he was holding the pipe, and the Curator went down to his knees and cried looking into Noah’s eyes for that flicker for that life., Instead, in the low hum of the city, he heard the buzzing of a fly hovering overhead.