The Forgery of Venus Read Online Free

night staring at it, and all those little brown swirls came alive and showed me the entire history of Western art, from Lascaux cave painting, through Cycladicsculpture and the Greeks and Giotto, Raphael, Caravaggio, right up to Cézanne, and not only that—it revealed to me the future of art, shapes and images that would break through the sterile wastelands of postmodernism and generate a new era in the great pageant of human creativity.
    And of course after that I couldn’t wait to trip again, so the next weekend I got all my art supplies lined up and the guitar pick in hand and I dropped a huge fucking dose, and nothing . Worse than nothing, because the guitar pick was just what it was, a cheap piece of plastic, but there was a malign presence in the room, like a giant black Pillsbury Doughboy, and I was being squashed and smothered under it and it was laughing at me, because the whole guitar pick event was a scam designed to get me to trip again so this thing could eat me.
    You remember Zubkoff, don’t you, my old roommate? Pre-med? The guy who stayed in his room studying all the time. We called him the Magic Mushroom? I heard from him again, out of the blue. He’s a research scientist now. I joined a study he was doing on a drug to enhance creativity.
    Did you ever wonder how your brain worked? Like, say, where do ideas come from? I mean, where do they come from? A completely new idea, like relativity or using perspective in painting. Or, why are some people terrifically creative and others are patzers? Okay, being you, maybe the whole issue never came up.
    But it’s always fascinated me, the question of questions, and even beyond that I desperately wanted to get back to the guitar pick, I wanted to see what’s next. I mean, in Western art. I still can’t quite believe that it’s all gurgled down to the nothing that it looks like now, big kitsch statues of cartoon characters, and wallpaper and jukeboxes, and pickled corpses, and piles of dry-cleaning bags in the corner of a white room, and “This is a cock.” Of course you might say, well, things pass. Europeans stopped doing representational art for a thousand years and then they started up again. Verse epics used to be the heart of literature all over the world and then they stopped getting written. So maybe the same thing has happened to easel painting. And we have the movies now. But then you have to ask, why is the art market so huge? People want paintings, and all that’s available is this terrible crap. There has to be some way of not being swamped in the ruthless torrent of innovation, as Kenneth Clark called it. As my father was always saying.
    I mean, you really have to ask, do we love the old masters because they’re old and rare, just portable chunks of capital, or do we love them because they give us something precious and eternally valuable? If the latter, why aren’t we still doing it? Okay, everybody’s forgotten how to draw, but still…
    Drifting here. Back to Zubkoff. He called me up. He said he was running a study out of the Columbia med school, lots of funding from the government, National Institutes of Mental Health, or whatever, to explore whether human creativity could be enhanced by taking a drug. They were using art students, music students, and he also wanted to get some older artists in on it, so they could check if age was a variable. And he thought of me. Well, free dope. That was never a hard sell.
    Anyway, I volunteered, and here we all are. And I’m sure you’re wondering now why, after however long it is, old Wilmot is dropping all this on me. Because you’re the only one left, the only person who knows me and who doesn’t care enough about me to humor me if I’m nuts. I’m being blunt, I know, but it’s true. And while I’m being blunt, of all the people I’ve known, you’re the one with the solidest grasp of what the world calls reality. You have no imagination at all. Again, sorry to drop this on you. I’m