Fiction: Bounced From an Art Gallery

by Allan Stevenson
arttimesjournal January 5, 2019

I was broke, and hungry, in Sydney. As I forlornly traipsed the wintry streets, I heard sounds of festivity issuing from an art gallery. I brushed the dust from my shoes with my jersey, brushed the jersey, and sauntered in.

My attention was immediately arrested by two contemporary tables, on which reposed wine and appetising snacks. I took up station midway between them, which left me facing the fire extinguisher, but then one can't have everything.

Fortunately, a celebrity in a canary yellow jacket arrived just then, causing the sort of diversion that one thus attired might reasonably expect to cause. I seized the opportunity to make an assault on the snacks and the wine.

With the urgent pangs of hunger appeased, I then gave a tolerably good impression of a connoisseur inspecting the paintings. Or so I thought; I was just stretching out a stealthy paw for one of the rapidly dwindling savouries, when I was transfixed by the outraged stare of a refugee from a slimming clinic.

Her plump chins arrayed themselves in battle formation, she drew herself up, and then sailed majestically towards me. I didn't care for the set of her mouth, nor for the moustache of it, and hastily poured myself a fortifying glass of wine.

She berthed alongside me, in a billowing of silk, and attacked without preamble. "Do you like it?" she demanded, stabbing a fat, bejewelled forefinger at a splotch of incompatible colours. There was an implied threat of public exposure as a free-loading Philistine, should my assessment prove unsatisfactory.

I lit a cigarette and inhaled luxuriously. Took a sip of wine.

'I was looking at it earlier," I told her. "There are, of course, the vestiges of a flirtation with Dadaism there, but I think he's trying to reconcile a subjective dynamism with Futurism, and lacks the assurance of … say, a Cezanne, to do it'. I'd rehearsed it while plundering the tables, and I blundered only slightly, trying to pronounce 'dynamism' with a thickish tongue.

For a long cold moment we stared at one another, then she wheeled, and made a strategic retreat. It was only deuce, however … and her to serve.

A sideways glance revealed her in earnest conversation with a large man, who had the look of an erudite bouncer. He looked at me, nodded to her, and started towards me. I gained the door in a dozen quick steps, and beat it, pronto.

Nowadays, when the cognoscenti ask me if I like art, I say: "Yes, I like the little sausage rolls, and those cheese things, and the Riesling, and the cigarette fellow … what's his name … Rembrandt, that's it … he's not too bad either."

And they shudder in delicious distaste, and count themselves fortunate to be blessed with such good taste.

Allan Stevenson lives in Subiaco, Australia