All about style

She woke up, all of a sudden, and said: number 4 is a beautiful number. I never stop to think too much about these little semi-conscious insights. I've gotten used to them. Why not 5, I asked her. Too fat, she mumbled. Aha, so there was a logic. What about 7, then? tall and lean. Nah, too close to 10, which is not even a number any more, it's two. Well, then, you gotta love 1. Most certainly not, that little bastard is almost worthless, easily confused with a letter and has no aesthetic value whatsoever, it's just a line. I see, so I shouldn't even mention 8, that fatty should get 3 to take him out jogging; at least the latter has managed to loose half the weight. And what's the deal with 6 and 9, are they fat? They are, but they can also be sexy; especially when they come together, those two mean business. But if we're talkin' sexy, it's gotta be 2. Just look at it, all the right curves and angles. Go ahead draw a 2 with your finger, you know you want to. Go easy on the top and then just finish up the base of it in one quick motion. I'll wait... You see! Damn hot!

All right then, back to sleep. Think again. You know what would be great, she asked me ten minutes later. Switching to binary, so that we strip counting of its sex appeal and leave no bastion for eroticism in the numerical realm? What? No. She had already forgotten about the number issue evidently (not that she would have remembered being half asleep). Wouldn't it be great if there were paintings that combined two styles? One for the background and one for the foreground. And I'm not talking about just fuzzy techniques against sharp details; I'm talking about a cubist background and a fauve foreground. I'm talking about golden gothic characters against pointillist backgrounds. Or how about bright colored pop-art common day objects against an abstract conceptual landscape. Wait... scratch that, imagine this scene: several characters, all painted with a different style against one of those Rothko-like dark canvases. Yes, sure, I picture it, I said, you could then drip paint all over it and stick some recycled trash on top, sounds great, now go back to sleep. Hey, I'm serious, Yeah, me too. Look, I'm sure someone has done that already, seeing as how every Russian and Chinese millionaire now buys every piece of art that can be stored in a vault somewhere, so that you don't actually have to look at something as horrendous. Not for long, though, last issue of Prospect says the art bubble is the next one to burst. And I don’t mean to burst yours, but could we sleep now?

And so we did, but speaking of the Chinese and art: the other day we were invited to dinner at the home of a guy from Hong Kong. The last stop in the tour of his house – which, by the way, apparently used to belong to a famous Dutch prostitute – was a small sculpture of a man with metal staples in his back. He told us about how a friend had done this after he had recovered from breaking his back some years ago. I didn’t see it, but I could imagine his Dutch boyfriend listening in the kitchen rolling up his eyes and thinking: there he goes again, with his broken back story.