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  “Who’s Malinovski?”

  “Yes, quite! Exactly! Who is he indeed! But Circle magazine is doing a story on him, and when it appears, Art Monthly will immediately do one too, and that same day my boss will call me in and ask why we’ve missed the boat again. So I’m taking the first step.”

  “And if Circle magazine doesn’t?”

  “They’ll certainly do something, because I will have done it already. And I’m going to write that it’s a disgrace if someone like Malinovski doesn’t get the attention he deserves. And that when it comes to us, sheer noise always triumphs over quality. That’s what I’m going to say, not bad, huh? Noise over quality. Not bad! That’ll make Humpner at Art Monthly really shit in his pants, and they’ll follow up right away, and I’m already established as the man who discovered Malinovski. That’s the advantage of writing for a daily paper instead of a magazine with a two-month lead time. You can figure out what they’re planning, and you can beat them.”

  “What kind of artist is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Malinovski.”

  “No idea. That’s why I’m going there. To find out.”

  He sits there beside me, all bloated, unshaved, almost totally bald, his jacket so crumpled he looks as if he’s slept in it. In the Middle Ages, a person’s appearance mirrored their soul: evil people were ugly, good people beautiful. The nineteenth century taught us that this is nonsense. But all it takes is a little life experience and you realize it’s not so wrong.

  “Did you go to the Khevenhüller opening?” he asks.

  I shake my head. And because I read the papers too, I know with absolute certainty that now he’s going to say that Khevenhüller has done nothing but repeat himself for a long time now.

  “He doesn’t do anything new anymore. Always the same, rehash after rehash. Between ’90 and ’98 he was original. He had something to say. Now it’s older than old hat.”

  The train stops, the doors open, and a group of Japanese tourists pours in, about thirty of them, half of them wearing protective face masks. Silently squeezed together they fill the entire carriage.

  Zollner leans over to me. “I wish I had your job.”

  “You can have it,” I say in a drawl. “You’d be good at it.”

  He turns away again, so self-absorbed that he doesn’t notice I’m being dishonest. “In fifteen years I’ll be jobless. No more newspapers. Only on the net. And I’m not even fifty. Too young to retire. Too old to change horses.”

  I have an idea for an Eulenboeck painting. A portrait of Zollner, from really close up, the way he’s sitting next to me now, in the greenish artificial light of the carriage, in front of a background made up of the gaggle of Japanese, and the title The Arbiter of Art. But of course it won’t do, you’ve been dead too long, poor Heinrich, and nobody would believe it was genuine.

  “All the young people! Fresh out of college, year by year, more and more of them. They work as interns, fetch coffee, ask if I want sugar, look over my shoulder, and brood about what it is I can do that they can’t. They all understand something about art, Friedland! They’re none of them stupid. They all want my job. And where do I go then? To Art Review Online? I’d rather hang myself.”

  “Yes, well,” I say, embarrassed. He will remember this conversation, and he won’t forgive me.

  “But they don’t have the feel for it. They don’t know when it’s time to praise Malinovski and when the time for that is already over. They allow themselves to be impressed, they like something or they don’t like something; that’s their mistake. They don’t know what’s required of them.”

  “Required?”

  “No one can fool me. Nothing impresses me. To know whether someone’s on the way up or on the way down takes experience, you have to have the instinct!” He rubs his face. “But the pressure, you have no idea! Molkner, for example. First he praised Spengrich, whom it’s impossible to like anymore, then he made a point of recommending Hähnel, two days before Lens on Culture unearthed the fact that Hähnel is anti-democratic, and then he named photorealism as the art form of the future. A pathetic attempt to position himself against Lümping and Karzel as the force of conservatism, but the idiot picked the exact moment when Karzel was using us in the Evening News to mount his attack on the New Realists. You remember, even Eulenboeck got handed his head on a platter. Totally lousy timing! And now? What do you think?”

  “Yes?” I dimly remember Molkner: a little man, always sweating profusely, very nervous, balding, pointed beard.

  “Now he’s nothing but a sort of freelancer,” Zollner whispers, as if at all costs to conceal this from the Japanese. “And Lanzberg, his former assistant and total piece of shit, is firmly ensconced as editor, overseeing the articles Molkner sends back from exhibition previews out in the sticks. Merciless! Believe me, this business is merciless.” He nods, listens to his own words, jumps up abruptly, and gives me another slap on the shoulder. “Sorry, I’m in a lousy mood. My mother died.”

  “How terrible!”

  He pushes his way through the Japanese to the door. “You’ll believe anything!”

  “So she didn’t die?”

  “Not today, at least.” He elbows aside a man with a face mask and leaps out. The doors close, the train moves on, for a moment I can still see him waving, then we’re traveling through the darkness again.

  One of the Japanese sits down next to me and presses little buttons on his camera. This subway line is not a scenic route, the only thing up ahead is the industrial zone on the edge of town. The tour group is on the wrong train. Someone ought to tell them. I close my eyes and say nothing.

  So I was never going to rank as a painter. This much I now knew. I worked the same way I had before, but there was no longer any point. I painted houses, I painted meadows, I painted mountains, I painted portraits that didn’t look bad, they showed skill, but so what? I did abstract paintings that were harmoniously composed, with careful juxtapositions of color, but so what?

  What does it mean to be average—suddenly the question became a constant one. How do you live with that, why do you keep on going? What kind of people bet everything on a single card, dedicate their lives to the creative act, undertake the risk of the one big bet, and then fail year after year to produce anything of significance?

  Of course, it is part of the nature of a bet that you can lose it. But when it actually happens to you, do you lie to yourself, or can you honestly come to terms with it? How do you proudly put together your little exhibitions, collect your scattered little reviews, and take it as a given that there’s an entire realm of achievement way above you in which you will never take part? How do you deal with that?

  “Write about being average.” It was Martin’s idea back then, in the monastery garden at Eisenbrunn. And he was right: I could always become an art historian with an unusual field of research. So I wrote a letter to Heinrich Eulenboeck. I didn’t lie, but I also didn’t mention the title of my dissertation: Mediocrity as an Aesthetic Phenomenon. All I did was describe how I had come upon his paintings by chance in an old catalog: Flemish farmhouses, soft hills, welcoming riverbanks, friendly bales of hay, really well painted, with power and a certain soul. That, I’d thought, was what would have become of me. The stubborn expertise, the self-contained perfection. That would have been me.

  He sent a delighted reply, and off I went. I was exhausted, because I had just ended a brief affair with a French choreographer, full of passion, fights, screaming and yelling, alcohol, a breakup, a reconciliation, another breakup, and a trip could not have come at a better time. A long stretch by train, then a long stretch with another train, then a crossing on the ferry, then a long stretch on a bus, until finally I was standing facing him in his bright studio. The sea shimmered in the windows with a cool, northerly light.

  He was in his early sixties back then, more imposing than I had expected, an elegant gentleman with a white mustache, impeccable clothes, and an ivory cane, witty, relaxed, and cult
ivated. I had planned to leave again the next day, but I stayed. And I stayed the next day and the day after that, and then the whole week and the whole year, and the year after that. I stayed until he died.

  The lights in the subway shrink, become a single patch, then disappear. Beauty has no need of art, it has no need of us, either, it has no need of witnesses, quite the opposite. Gaping observers detract from it, it blazes most brightly where no one can see it: broad landscapes devoid of houses, the changing shapes of clouds in the early evening, the washed-out grayish red of old brick walls, bare trees in winter mists, cathedrals, the reflection of the sun in a puddle of oil, the mirrored skyscrapers of Manhattan, the view out an airplane window right after it’s climbed through the layer of clouds, old people’s hands, the sea at any time of day, and empty subway stations like this one—the yellow light, the haphazard pattern of cigarette butts on the ground, the peeling advertisements, still fluttering in the slipstream of the train, although the train itself has just disappeared.

  The escalator carries me upward, the street organizes itself around me, the summer sky forms an arch high over my head. I look in all directions—not just out of caution, because this is a dangerous neighborhood, but because we’re put here on earth to see. The garbage cans are casting their short midday shadows, a child whips past on a skateboard, arms outstretched, simultaneously swaying and in perpetual risk of falling. The same beam of sunlight flashes high up in a window and down here in the rearview mirror of a parked car. The dark rectangle of a drain cover, all geometrical, and way above it, as if set against it deliberately, the vague trail of a vanishing cloud. I open a door quickly, go inside, and shut it behind me. An ancient elevator carries me jerkily from floor to floor up to the top. Only on the third floor is there a seldom-used warehouse; the rest of the building is empty. The elevator grinds noisily to a halt, I get out and unlock a steel door. I’m immediately surrounded by the smell of acrylic, wood, and lime, and the rich aroma of pigments. How good it is to be able to work. Sometimes I get the suspicion I’m actually a happy man.

  No one knows about this studio, no one can connect me to it. It wasn’t me who bought it, but a firm that belongs to another firm that is based in the Cayman Islands and in turn belongs to me. If anyone were to inspect the land registers, they wouldn’t find my name. It would take a great deal of time and effort to keep digging until they found me. The property taxes, heating, water and electricity bills are handled automatically by a numbered account in Liechtenstein. Whistling to myself, I hang up my jacket, roll up my sleeves, and put on my overalls. A dozen paintings are leaning against the wall, covered by a cloth, and in front of them is one that’s almost finished on the easel.

  Luckily I have no need of glasses; my eyesight is as sharp as it ever was. Born to see, appointed to look. So I stand in front of the picture and contemplate it. A village square in a little French town. In the center a gaudy sculpture, clearly by Niki de Saint Phalle: an outsized, brightly colored female figure holding her arms in the air. The sky is cloudless. At the edge of the square, children with bicycles are clustered around a small boy who is holding his head in his hands and crying. A woman is looking out a window. Her mouth is wide open—she’s calling someone. A man in a parked car is looking up at her threateningly. There’s a dark puddle at the edge of the square that may or may not be blood. A dachshund is drinking from it. Something terrible has happened and the people seem to be wanting to cover it up. If you were to look a little longer, hunt a little better for clues, you’d be able to figure it out, or at least you think so. But if you step back, the details disappear and all that remains is a colorful street scene: bright, cheerful, full of life. Large posters advertise beer, cheese spread, and various brands of cigarettes in the style of the early seventies.

  I work in silence, sometimes aware of my own whistling. Only a few details are still missing. The quiet of the studio surrounds me like a solid substance. The noise of the city doesn’t penetrate up here, and even the heat is blocked. It can continue like that for long stretches. When I think back on the hours of work, I can barely remember them—it’s as if they had been extinguished by my concentration.

  Up here a couple of points of light to add, and down there a shadow to blur the features of the child. The number plate needs a fleck of rust. People need to be able to see the brushstrokes, thick, in the style of the Old Masters! And then the last point of light, an accent made up of white, ocher, and orange. I step back, lift the palette, take a little bit of black, and with a quick stroke add the date and signature in the corner: Heinrich Eulenboeck, 1974.

  When I was young, vain, and lacking all experience, I thought the art world was corrupt. Today I know that’s not true. The art world is full of lovable people, full of enthusiasts, full of longing and truth. It is art itself as a sacred principle that unfortunately doesn’t exist.

  It doesn’t exist any more than God does, or the End of Days, or eternity, or the Heavenly Host. All that exists are works, different in style, in form, and in essence, and the whispered hurricane of opinions about them. And the changing names of these artists that with the passage of time get attached to the selfsame objects. There are not a few Rembrandts that were once considered to be the apogee of painting and that we now know to have been painted by hands other than his. Does this lessen them?

  “Of course not!” the laymen cry zealously, but it’s not that simple. A picture is not that selfsame picture if it was made by someone else. A work is very closely linked with our image of who brought it into the world when, why, and driven by what impulse? A pupil who has acquired all his master’s skills and now paints like him still remains a pupil, and if van Gogh’s paintings had been made by an affluent gentleman a generation later, the same rank would not be accorded to them. Or would it?

  Things really do get even more complicated. Who has heard of Emile Schuffenecker? And yet he painted numerous pictures for which we worship van Gogh. We’ve known this for some time, but has van Gogh’s reputation suffered as a result? Lots of van Goghs are not by van Gogh, Rembrandt’s paintings are not all by Rembrandt, and I’d be very surprised if every Picasso was a Picasso. I don’t know if I’m a forger; it depends, like everything in life, on how you define it. Nonetheless Eulenboeck’s most famous paintings, all the ones on which his reputation rests, were created by the same person, namely me. But I’m not proud of that. I haven’t changed my opinion: I’m not a painter. That my paintings are hanging in museums says nothing against the museums and nothing in favor of my pictures.

  All museums are full of fakes. So what? The provenance of each and every thing in this world is uncertain; there’s no particular magic involved in art, and the works that are ranked as great have not been brushed by an angel’s wings. Art objects are objects just like everything else: some are extraordinarily accomplished, but none of them springs from a higher universe. That some are linked with the name of this or that person, that some of them fetch high prices and others don’t, that some are world-famous and most are not, is due to a number of different forces, but none of these is otherworldly. Nor do forgeries have to be successful to fulfill their purpose: perfect imitations can be unmasked while imperfect ones are hung on walls and admired. Forgers who are proud of their work overestimate the importance of well-grounded skill in exactly the same way as laypeople do: anyone who isn’t totally inept and makes the effort can learn a craft. It’s quite right that craft lost its importance within art, it makes sense that the idea behind a work became more important than the work itself; museums are sacred institutions that have outlived themselves, as the avant-garde has been saying for a long time now, with good reason.

  But visitors to cities want somewhere to go when the afternoons are long, and without museums there would be a lot of blank pages in the travel guides. Because there have to be museums, they also have to exhibit things, and these things have to be objects, not ideas, just as collectors want to hang things, and pictures are better to hang on walls than
ideas. Admittedly, an ironic free spirit once displayed a urinal in a museum to mock the institution and all its holy affectations and artistic pieties, but he also wanted money and honors and, above all, he wanted to be admired in the traditional way, and so a replica of the original still stands on its plinth, surrounded by holy affectations and artistic pieties. Although the theory that the museum has outlived itself is correct, the museum has in fact won, the urinal is exclaimed over, and as for the theory behind it, only students in their second semester still wonder about it.

  I often think about the artists of the Middle Ages. They didn’t sign things, they were craftsmen who belonged to guilds, they were spared the disease that we call ambition. Can it still be done that way, can you still do the work without taking yourself seriously—can you still paint without being “a painter”? Anonymity is no help, it’s merely a clever hiding place, another form of vanity. But painting in the name of someone else is a possibility; it works. And what amazes me all over again every day is: it makes me happy.

  The idea came to me already on the third day. Heinrich was asleep next to me, the sea was casting its reflections on the ceiling, and I suddenly realized how I could make him a famous painter. What distinguished him, what he lacked, what I had to do were all quite clear to me. He would be good on television and in magazine photos, and he would give wonderful interviews. The only drawback was those farmhouses. It was going to take diplomacy.

  A few weeks later I raised it for the first time. We had just been looking at his most recent work: a farmhouse with barn, a farmhouse with farmers mowing, a farmhouse with surly, arrayed farm family, plus cockerel, manure pile, and clouds.

  “Let’s agree that it’s possible to become famous by fulfilling all the requirements and doing what’s opportune. Then what? You would be mocking a world that deserves it and simultaneously collecting what you’re owed. What’s bad about that?”