An Object of Beauty - By Steve Martin Page 0,4

dollars to buy a sketch by an unfamiliar Spaniard with three names. She watched Heath Acosta on the sideline, beaming, but she couldn’t figure out what he was beaming about. Every other picture remained unsold. He was probably trying to put a brave face on the crashing sale. She watched as pictures she had grown fond of downstairs stiffed in front of the sullen crowd, meaning they would be returned downstairs, where they would wait for their disappointed owners to claim them.

La Mondaine, James Tissot, 1883–1885

58.3 × 40.5 in.

Next up was James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s picture of a theater lobby filling up just after the curtain call. Men in opera hats steer their young femmes toward the exit; the women wear lavish dresses, sport hats that cost as much as carriages, and swim under billows of fur. Tissot was the master of a small subject—the rich—and he swathed the women in yards of fabric and painted them midflounce as they disembarked from boats, lounged in parks, or sat on window seats overlooking the sea.

The estimate on the Tissot was five hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand. There was a small stir when the rotating display brought it into view; it looked good. If it stalled, it would be hard for Acosta to maintain his plastered beam. The picture started off at three hundred fifty thousand, and no paddles were raised. Acosta seemed unfazed. He scanned the room, then nodded, and the auctioneer called out, “I have three hundred fifty thousand.” Soon, four hundred thousand. Then, four hundred fifty thousand. Then the auctioneer took a leap: no more fifty-thousand-dollar increments. Six hundred thousand. Seven hundred thousand. The picture crossed a million, then a million five, and then once again in fifty-thousand-dollar increments, finally selling at two million dollars.

Was this a one-off, or was the art recession loosening? Was Acosta smiling because he had known of secret bids aimed at the Tissot? Auctioneers often knew in advance what someone was willing to bid. Lacey noticed that as the pace of the bids picked up, she felt a concomitant quickening of her pulse, as though she had been incised by an aphrodisiacal ray.

That evening she called Jonah Marsh, the cute deejay, and met him late night at MoMA. They walked around and looked at paintings until she had recharged the morning’s ardor, finally taking him home with her. After sexual due process—an outbreak of inhibition, contortion, flying words, and sweat with fair exchanges on both sides—Jonah groggily left, again relieving Lacey of the burden of postcoital chat. She sipped port and stared out her window, a window still grimy with the residue of winter, and relived the auction earlier that day. One million, one million five… two million. Someone had just cashed in grandly, unexpectedly. It made her wonder: Could she make money in art, Tissot money?

At Sotheby’s, she started to look at paintings differently. She became an efficient computer of values. The endless stream of pictures that passed through the auction house helped her develop a calculus of worth. Auction records were available in the Sotheby’s library, and when a picture of note came in, she diligently searched the Art Price Index to see if it had auction history. She factored in condition, size, and subject matter. A Renoir of a young girl, she had witnessed, was worth more than one of an old woman. An American western picture with five tepees was worth more than a painting with one tepee. If a picture had been on the market recently without a sale, she knew it would be less desirable. A deserted painting scared buyers. Why did no one want it? In the trade, it was known as being “burned.” Once a picture was burned, the owner had to either drastically reduce the price or sit on it for another seven years until it faded from memory. When Lacey began these computations, her toe crossed ground from which it is difficult to return: she started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

5.

LACEY KNEW I was coming uptown and insisted I stop by Sotheby’s for lunch. She had something to show me, she said. I met her at the Sotheby’s sandwich bar, and we snagged a sunny corner table.

“Do you want to see a picture of my grandmother?” asked Lacey.

“Is this a trick question?” I said.

She reached into her wide-mouth purse and withdrew a very used art book covered with library acetate and bearing a small, rectangular label with what looked like