Page 2 of Iron Blade

"You see, I can tell when something is great. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I continuously fell short." I shrugged with one shoulder. "I'm sure you know the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, curate."

Polite chuckles bubbled from the audience. Yes, yes, laugh. Believe that I am the mistress of great taste! I can make everyone think you have great taste too!

I clapped my hands and rubbed my palms together to regain their focus, and lead them on to the next painting. Another “Jerry Vasali”. This one I had created in a rage, beating the canvas as I lamented the sad, sad state of my life.

When I got accepted into The Pacific Arts School, PacArts, I was full of dreams and ideals. I thought that a well-placed satirical drawing could change the world! A cartoon in the New Yorker, a photograph like Dorothea Lang’s Migrant Mother, or Banksy’s Flower Thrower could uplift and challenge the human spirit! If we worked hard, had convictions and poured our souls into our art then we, too, could change the world.

That was all bullshit, of course.

There was so much nepotism and luck that went into this nonsense that it didn’t even make sense. If you weren’t built just right, then you were doomed to making logos for corporate pharma-bros to afford enough ramen to get you through the week.

Thankfully, I learned early that I had a talent for precision mimicry. That was what I was hired to do. To mimic. Or, more precisely, forge.

Did I want to be the poor imitation of an artist? No. But it was my job. My real job. And to do it, I had to do little more than gesticulate like a tanned Vanna White.

I took them through more paintings.

Because they weren't my forgeries, I was less than impressed with them. Though that took no acting, because they weren't impressive. Neither were mine, to be fair. But like the stock market, the value of these works of art didn't hinge on anything real. The perception of their worth was what made them valuable.

Like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause, it was all made up.

My trailing entourage of rich assholes begged me to tell them what to think. And they took my word as gospel. The same keywords were sprinkled in to get the right reactions.

"This evokes... " I would say, then rattle off some artists these people might have heard of. Something that sounded sophisticated but obscure enough that you only knew it if you were marginally educated.

"The artist seems inspired by..." I'd wax on about what the artist might have been thinking in big, abstract words that signified jack shit.

I was bored. I had done this so much over the past seven years that I could perform on autopilot.

At least, until I came upon a canvas that I did not expect.

It was black, which doesn't mean anything. Plenty of pseudo-goths tried to go with black as their medium. But paradoxically, this painting was made of light. The bracken space of the large canvas looked like a hyper-real dream; every corner painted with the precision of a horse hair. Like every pixel was hand-done.

In the bleakness of it was a shadowed face, like a Mona Lisa. There was a smile that didn't touch the eyes. There was a brow full of sorrow and loneliness, but with no outright sign of those same emotions. The portrait beckoned you to come to that conclusion with the clues of darkness, stark shadows, and lonely specs of dust made of light.

"I-I don't know this artist." I looked around, as if the artist would be in the crowd of charlatans. "I haven't seen this before."

I stepped close to the canvas, my nose within inches of its dried paint. The faint, familiar scent of oils invaded my senses. There was something else in it. Something I couldn't quite detect.

I eyed what I could make of the brush strokes, but they were so perfect that it was reminiscent of the Renaissance Masters. It was fascinating, because with the advent of Photoshop, people rarely cultivated these skills. Why bother when you can just paint something on a computer and waste fewer materials? A canvas doesn’t have an “undo” button the way a computer does.

This was a skill. This was dedication.

This was love.

I couldn't pretend indifference to something as gorgeous as this.

"This is extraordinary," I whispered knowing that I was hurting my own cause by giving this artwork credit. "It takes ten thousand hours to become an expert. But this technique, the cleanness of the brush strokes, the subtlety of texture and light suggests something closer to a hundred thousand hours of dedicated practice."

The crowd faded away into nothingness as I basked in the glory of, for once, seeing a piece of art that wasn't pretentious. It wasn't the workings of an over-educated trust fund kid with the wealth to go to art school. It didn’t smack of the workings of some soft-hearted, pseudo-pretentious old money whiner without the grit to make real comments about life and death.

No, this was something so completely special that I wasn't even sure how it ended up in a gallery among the detritus of upper-class vanity.

“This,” I waved a finger as I looked at my followers, then turned back to the painting. “This is special. It’s…” I let out a wistful sigh. “It's incredible.”

I tilted my head and pushed out one hip, saddling my weight on my right leg.

A small hum of approval sounded behind me. People mimicked my movements like lemmings. They were empty vessels. Nothing more than robots, play-acting humanity.

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