Art is Capital

It’s Happy Hour at the Wobblie Wonk on Rivington Street. A Pandora rockabilly station is playing Wanda Jackson’s “Let’s Have a Party” as the curtain rises. Carl and Sam are sitting by themselves. There is an empty seat between them. Carl is wearing a Paul Smith suit, Hermes tie, and Berluti loafers. Sam is wearing jeans and an open-necked white shirt spattered with paint. The bartender is texting at the other end of the bar.

Sam (to the bartender): Another Calvados for the gentleman on my right.

Carl (to Sam): Thank you.

Sam: My pleasure.

The bartender comes over and pours a glass of Calvados for Sam.

Carl: I’ve seen you in here a few times. You live nearby?

Sam: I live in Tribeca but my studio is nearby. How about you?

Carl: I live and work in the financial district. But I usually go for a long walk after the market closes.

Sam: What do you do?

Carl: I manage an investment fund.

Sam: Do you enjoy it?

Carl: Actually I do enjoy it, at least most of the time. Of course I don’t enjoy it when I make moves that in hindsight prove to be wrong-headed, but one hopefully learns at least a little something from one’s mistakes.

Sam: Overall you do well? You beat the market averages?

Carl: To date I have. The fund is five years old and I’ve outperformed the S&P by a good margin every year. But my success could just be a function of randomness, I don’t know for sure. If you flip five coins a hundred times and tally the results you’ll likely have a number of cases in which heads come up five times in a row. Maybe that’s all my outperforming the market really is.

Sam: My way of beating the market averages is reflected in the prices my dealer can command for my canvases compared with the average sales price of works by other artists in my age cohort. Or that’s what one is led to believe in the essay “Art is Capital” that was purportedly written by one J. Guggenheim Sachs III. My sources in the art-crit world tell me this is the nom de guerre of a philosophy professor at Columbia who takes great delight in skewering the hedge fund haute bourgeoisie.

Carl: What are you working on now?

Sam: I’m putting the finishing touches on one of a pair of family portraits. They’re titled Imbeciles 1 and Imbeciles 2. At the bottom of each painting is the statement: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carl: Ah, the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote from the 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, which upheld the sterilization of Carrie Bell on the grounds that she was feeble-minded.

Sam: Exactly. Above the legend Imbeciles 1 depicts Ambassador Joe Kennedy in Nazi regalia, Senator Teddy Kennedy driving off the Chappaquiddick Bridge, and Representative Patrick Kennedy giving a demented, drug-fueled speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. Imbeciles 2 shows analogous scenes from the lives of Senator Prescott Bush, President George H. W. Bush, and President George W. Bush.

Carl: I think you have a stronger subject with Imbeciles 1. Not that the Bushes are any less imbecilic than the Kennedys, at least in my opinion. But they are certainly a lot less colorful.  For the Kennedys you could alternatively have shown Jack banging the Nazi Spy known as Inga Binga and John John dressed as an airplane pilot. But what can you show the Bushes doing – 41 passing out into his food at a state dinner in Tokyo and 43 clearing brush on his ranch, and who the hell even remembers Prescott Bush?

Sam: As you no doubt would surmise the painting that’s just about finished is Imbeciles 1. And I’m happy to report that it has pre-sold for seven figures. So the next one is on me….