At the opening, each artist was posed uncomfortably by the scroll he’d painted, limbs arranged to mimic one of the subjects in the piece. Most of the men treated the whole thing as a lark—if the crazy American girl was going to pay them one thousand dollars apiece to paint her friends like Chinese people and then be examined and exclaimed over by peacocks holding wineglasses, then, by god, they’d do it!—but one of them, the one who spoke the most serviceable English, held out for an exorbitant raise. “You think we don’t know art world?” he demanded. “Not for wall at home! Gallery! Museum! You pay five thousand dollars!” And, in the end, she had.
It was all worth it when Peter Schjeldahl’s review—a full column!—had come out in The New Yorker, saying that she was brave and brilliant for “exposing the uncomfortable tête-à-tête betwixt the viewer and the viewed by turning the artist’s twenty-first-century position of power back to a position of servitude—the brush only strokes at the command of its paymaster, the hand that holds the brush has no more agency than the bristles themselves.”
A hat trick. A trifecta. A father, son, and holy ghost of growing critical and commercial success that, of course, had to be gunned down by unlucky number four. Saina remembered her mother telling her, when she was very young, never to choose the number four. Sz. It sounded like the word for death and was so unlucky that people avoided phone numbers and addresses with the number, which was why her undemanding mother always insisted on a room change whenever they were assigned to the fourth floor of a hotel. Her fourth solo show, which had opened this spring, the one that had taken the most work, the most thought, the most time, was torn down by the same people who had praised her every previous effort. And then, on top of that, the lady reporters went crazy. Jezebel came out with an early post trashing her show—their commenters called it “emotionally rapey.” The day after, the Huffington Post, Slate’s Double XX blog, and Ms. magazine joined in. Soon, in a mind-boggling show of solidarity, the American Task Force on Palestine, Amnesty International, and the American Jewish Committee had banded together and issued a statement condemning Saina, her privileged ignorance, her gallery, American intervention in foreign wars, and the general callousness of the art world. For two weeks, protesters had picketed the show until her gallerist finally shuttered it a week early, claiming that the space had been cited for code violations and needed to make emergency renovations. The next day Hermès issued a statement apologizing for their involvement and pledging that all proceeds from the sale of the scarves they’d special issued for her show would be donated to refugee charities.
Saina still couldn’t see what was so offensive about this show when none of her others had raised any eyebrows. There had been no Big Issue screeds about the exploitation of the homeless in response to her Basel project, no Chinese groups hounded her with photos of dead Tiananmen Square protesters. And yet, even as she’d been supervising the hanging of this fourth show, one of the handlers had turned to her and said, “Oh boy, they’re gonna get good and pissed about this one.” He’d been holding the bottom of a 48 x 72 canvas with a blowup of a stunning young Palestinian refugee in a flower-print headscarf whom Saina had removed from a Time photo that also included armed Israeli soldiers and, with the assistance of Photoshop, placed on a seat in a beautifully lit studio. The catalog for the show was printed like a fashion lookbook, with sans serif text in the bottom right corner: “Soraya is wearing the Conqueror scarf in Beit Hanoun. Cotton-rayon, 4' x 4'. $1,200. Delivery 7/08.”
“So, what do you think?” asked Billy. “They’re talking cover story!”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Or if it would really make sense for me right now. I don’t know if I want to be memorialized as a cautionary tale. Anyways, I’ve already been a cover story.”
“The Village Voice,” he said, dismissively.
“It was horrible.”
Just remembering it gave Saina a cold feeling. The tabloid used a photo of her from that first opening for Made in China, where she was dressed in a ridiculous confection of a dress and laughing, mouth wide, eyes squeezed shut. The headline type was giant—EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES?—and the entire piece pilloried Saina, saying she was an insensitive, opportunistic rich girl who preyed on the public’s feelings and insulted the fine tradition of conceptual art that was born in glory with the Dadaist movement and died an ignoble death at her hands. She had already sold her apartment by then, but even if she hadn’t, just seeing her once-happy face screaming out from every battered red kiosk and strewn across coffee-shop floors would have been enough to send her slinking out of the city, a starving alley cat running from a gang of murderous children.
“Garbage. Anyways, anyways, I wrote that first story.” He leaned forward, urgent. “That was the one.”
It felt like a million years ago. Another world. Another life. Saina looked at him. “Are you trying to say that you made me, Billy?” This was one thing she’d always been able to do—say the things that might have been better left unsaid.