Part 2
I was listening Kraftwerk's Europe Endless when the telephone rung. "Elegants, and decadents..."
—I listen.
—You're in trouble, man.
—Possibly—it was a male voice that I did not know. It seemed ancient—. Who are you?
—I am Don José Nieto, art dealer of Diego Velázquez. You're in trouble, man.
The manager of Velázquez. This should explain his inclusion in 'Las Meninas', in the background, monitoring all the play.
—About?
—You've been using a work of my client without permission. You must pay for this.
—Hey: it is a three centuries old painting. It is public domain. Look Wikipedia.
—Error. We know what you've said right above: that time has not importance for the work of artist. It is relative. Three centuries or five minutes: it is the same. Our lawyers will destroy you.
—I've earned no money with this. I didn't get richer, except for an increasing in my knowledge and intellectual background.
—You've got richer, money or thoughts it doesn't matter. And you did it by using the work of my client. This has a price—he was not English. Me neither.
—Yeah, and you´ll get a nice bite, isn't it?
—I am representing the artist's rights in a free market society. What was this intellectual benefits that you've earned?—he said intellectual as he had a viscous living toad inside his mouth.
—Well—I tried to speak with the deep, slow and professional low tone that I used to employ when I wanted to look a respectable guy—, I've read some evaluations and critics that made me think about my own work.
—Your own work, yes—his ironic tone made me think in Carl Sagan answering a question about the little green men—. May I ask you for an example, please?
—My own work, yes—I affirmed—. It was in my first Required Assignment, that I posted in my sketchbook-blog and in the appropriate forum for. I was very proud about my piece: it was a composition of eighteen objects that I shooted both as an ensamble as separately, editing each image in a pseudo-HDR look and telling a little and evocative story for each one, with a circular structure. First comments were highly favourable; my peers liked the images and the whole composition.
"But, some days later, a peer wrote a new comment, a very different one in its mood and depth. This comment was wrote in Spanish—the author suspected, from my name I think, that I was Spanish—and there was a lot of indignation and fury in it. Nevertheless he praised the quality of the pictures too: but the problem was in this very place. He pointed how the finishing touch in the photographs, and even in the composition of the whole set, drove my work to some common places of today's illusionistic tendencies. He compared it with Gothic architecture, the first, in his opinion, international style that flattened the different local architectural styles—well: I'm an architect, and I know that this is not true at all, but I understood what he wanted to say: that the automatic use of some tools and references taken from the mainstream destroys the individual voice of art works. He claimed that we are now in a New Gothic era, that came from Pixar or Tim Burton, that is clearing a lot of fine distinctions among the variety of Art. And he pushed against it. His description of my work was superb, and, in all honesty, true:
"El estilo internacional, tan reconocible, vorazmente occidental, ultra digital en todo sentido, desde las elecciones tipográficas hasta el clásico tono de nostalgia por la mecánica y la pesca, por su iconografía sobredigerida y refrita y auto reafirmativa....etc"
("The so recognizable, voraciously western, ultra-digital in every way, from the typographical choices to the classic tone of mechanics and fishing nostalgia, for their over-assimilate and revisited and self reafirmative iconography, international style .... etc")
"This critic was very useful to me, and because of its mood and words—even swearwords—I felt that it was a coment from the heart, a true critic from an artist. It forced me to watch my assignment as an aftermath of some stylistic currents and warned me against taking some graphic decisions without a previous thoughtful work and be suspicious about some kind of technical manierism that arrives not from the genuine act of creating an art work, growing from the actual concept or artisitic idea, but as a consequence of the dominant styles and the Art mainstream".
—Fishing nostalgia!—he laughed—. You're a looser. Call me if you want an art dealer to place your work in the market.
—I'm not an artist.
—For sure. By the way: little green men does exist.
—Of course. I've seen a lot of them everyday in El Prado Museum.
He hung down the phone violently. I did the same, as I always do when somebody phone me for whatever reason except for offering me a job. Then I turn my body to face the bookshelf and pick up a book, one of my favourites. I opened a page randomly and read:
Players plow not! Praises reap not!
