There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [43]
Warhol, Hugo says. If you see something duplicated over and over you’ll want it. You won’t be able to forget it. You’ll fall for it. You fell for it. Moronic. That’s what Warhol’s doing. He’s pointing out the moronic.
I like there being a choice of toothpastes, Caroline says. It makes me feel, well, real. But apparently I’m a moron who doesn’t understand or like modern art. Well, I don’t. I’m coming out, Mark, and I’m telling the whole table. I’m not a snob. I like to see a beautiful thing if I go to an art gallery as much as the next person. But contemporary art, I don’t like it, and most of the time I don’t understand it. Most of the time it’s so pointless.
There’s some good children’s literature out there, though, isn’t there? Jen says.
Almost on cue, the child sitting next to her puts her head down on her arm on the table. A moment later she is completely asleep.
Caroline, meanwhile, won’t be dissuaded, is red in the face, is shaking her head.
I mean, the songs and films you were talking about, Terence, they have an entertainment value at least, she says.
Depending what you class as entertainment, Richard says.
But it doesn’t change anything, Caroline says.
Actually, that’s debatable—Terence begins, but Hugo and Caroline cut him off.
Moron, Hugo is saying sweetly.
And neither does that woman artist’s pointless awful bed and pointless garden shed, Caroline is saying, or the pointless skull encrusted with diamonds, and that pointless artist who had the lights coming on and off in the room. It doesn’t make anything happen.
Well, Miles says. It does.
What does it make happen? Caroline says.
It makes the lights go on and off, Miles says.
He picks up Hugo’s glass of red, raises it at Eric and then at Jen.
A toast to our hosts, he says. To the Lees.
To the Lees of happiness, Bernice says.
To the Lees! everybody shouts. Hugo is quite drunk, doesn’t notice his red is gone and raises his white glass. While they’re all drinking, Miles puts Hugo’s glass of red down in front of Mark.
Then he leaves the room.
Caroline continues about how pointless art is.
No, Hugo says shaking his head too, I can’t believe I’m going to have to have this argument again about it. And the very fact that everybody goes on and on about the same people, as if art didn’t exist outside the tabloids. Emin and Hirst and so on, they’re old hat already, they get in the way of what their art does, and part of me is starting to believe they’ve become such a cliché precisely so that people can say exactly the tripe you’ve been saying and you’re about to say, and so there can be some kind of debate, not that I’d call it much of a debate by the way. But I won’t have it said, when there’s so much new art that’s so interrogatory, that subverts the things that need subverting, that challenges all the right preconceptions.
Here we go again, Hannah says.
The secret of life is art, Bernice says. That’s what Oscar Wilde said.
The secret of arty talk is death, Hannah says and draws her finger across her neck and makes a choking noise.
I don’t care what he says, Caroline says pointing at Hugo who has taken on a piqued, supercilious look. All those words you use all the time, darling, about it, like enhance and retro and articulate and interrogate.
Money and power, Richard says. The real magic words.
Yes, Caroline says, and that’s why I’m almost glad there’s been a recession, sorry Jen, because maybe it’ll shake up some of the stupid money there is in things like financial markets round the art he’s always going on about. The kind of art you go on about, where people put themselves in glass cases in a gallery and get looked at, or sell all their belongings, or someone casts the hole in a doughnut