The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [85]
“That is not worth the effort,” Hobart replied. “I’m sorry, Buster, Annie, but even if you showed them, I don’t think they would learn anything from it. Your parents, like many artists, are incapable of acknowledging this fact. Caleb and Camille have spent most of their lives assuring themselves that art is all that really matters.”
“Can you at least think of anyone who could help us?” Annie said, still struggling to maintain the pose of a capable person, of following their plan of action, regardless of whether or not it made sense any longer.
“Not a single person. Their agent, as I’m sure you know, passed away some time ago and they never bothered to look for other representation. They had very few friends, if any, in the art world; certainly no one else was doing the kind of things that they were. There was that man who wrote the book about your family, but I cannot imagine, under any circumstances, your parents communicating with him.”
The author he was talking about was Alexander Share, an art critic who had written a critical study of the Fangs’ work, Once Bitten: An Overview of the Perplexing Art of Caleb and Camille Fang. He had convinced Caleb and Camille to agree to several long interviews over the phone and in person; Buster and Annie were not allowed to talk to him. As it became clear that Share had some real reservations about their work, Caleb and Camille shut off communication with him and tried to get the publisher to kill the book, but in the end it didn’t matter. It was published, and it didn’t amount to much; people had already, long before Alexander Share tried to make sense of the Fangs’ work, decided the value of this kind of art. “Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog,” Caleb said when the book was published. “They’re examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for art.” When Annie and Buster asked why their parents had agreed to talk to Share in the first place, their mother said, “If you don’t get hung up on finding anything of worth, it’s kind of fun to dig around in blood and guts for a little while.”
Hobart went on down the list of possible accomplices, no one of note. “There were two artists who were pretty infatuated with all of you. The first one, Donald something-or-other, was basically a vandal, doing violent things to existing works of art. He was a supremely ignorant individual, but he was in awe of your parents.”
“Where is he?” Annie asked.
“He’s dead,” Hobart replied. “He fell off some sculpture he was trying to disassemble and cracked his head open.”
“Who’s the other person?” Annie asked, now finding herself simply amazed at learning something new, however trivial, about her parents.
“There was a woman, a former student of mine, actually, who managed to get close to your parents. She was young and beautiful and had the potential to make things complicated.” He paused to see if they understood his meaning. Annie kept her face impassive, and Hobart said, “Sex is what I was implying there. But she faded away after a while, once it was apparent that your parents had no interest in anything except making art. I believe I read in an alumni newsletter quite some time ago that she got married, had children, turned out to be normal. Usually, you hate when that happens, but it was the best thing for her. Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.”
Annie remembered very clearly a surprisingly young woman who helped her parents with one of their earlier pieces. Her name was Bonnie, or perhaps Betty. She had acted as if Buster and Annie did not exist, could not acknowledge anyone but the two artists she hoped to impress. Often those who were infatuated with Caleb and Camille seemed compelled to pretend that Buster and Annie