So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) by L.J. Kennedy

minutes of meeting him is no small
feat. I can officially say that you, Annie Green, are one lucky
slut.”
    “I humbly bow to that distinction. And yeah,
a cocktail doesn’t sound half bad.” In the back of my head, I was
enumerating all the stuff I still had to do—study for midterms and
finish my term paper on postwar art, to name just a couple—but I
kept thinking back to what Harrison had said. “After all, Kendra,
you only live once.”

Chapter Five
    It was
all I could do to keep my heart from jumping out of my chest, but
Professor Claremont’s words were music to my ears.
    “Quentin Pierce is going to be in town next
week!”
    She was unusually chipper as she spoke the
words. Funnily enough, many of the students in the class—some of
whom couldn’t care less about artists like Chagall or even
Warhol—raised their heads from their desks and iPhones and started
to mutter to each other excitedly.
    “OMG, are you serious?” Kendra hissed next to
me. I couldn’t help but smile. Despite the fact that Kendra wasn’t
exactly up on the latest trends in the art world (and despite the
fact that I admittedly wasn’t too keen on his work), just about
everybody knew who Quentin Pierce was. A thirtysomething who’d
taken the world by storm faster than Matthew Barney had in the
early 2000s, Pierce was a multigenre artist who had achieved
international stardom by doing ridiculously detailed drawings for
famous DJs at music festivals around the world. He’d supposedly
been fueled by LSD trips and torrid affairs with famous pop stars.
He also happened to be extremely reclusive and was well known for
his refusal to give interviews to anyone (except the occasional
exclusive for some obscure high-school newspaper).
    He was best known for his Masterpiece
Hoax , a project in which he intentionally replicated famous
masterpieces (the kind you might find hanging in the Louvre)
through digital painting—and then tried to auction them off as the
real thing. He succeeded with the first few paintings, until some
art scholar confirmed they were all fakes, which was when Pierce
revealed it was all a giant performance—some kind of commentary on
the blurred lines between digital and nondigital art, I guess. I
didn’t see what the big deal was, but it seemed to work on other
people. In my mind, his art was abrasive and harsh, like an old
Nintendo game that had fallen into a Salvador Dalí painting. But he
was the most famous artist in, well, the world right now, so I was
willing to forgo my druthers for the time being.
    “For those of you who are not familiar with
Quentin Pierce, he is one of our most important alumni in the arts
department here at NYU,” Professor Claremont went on. “His style
was generated from his fascination with dreams, esoteric knowledge,
and contemporary cognitive-science theories—specifically with
respect to the human brain and the way we communicate. Quentin’s
work is a remarkable visual commentary on the mysteries of our
world, so many of which remain hidden because they’re lodged in our
consciousness, rather than in full view. But I digress.
    “Quentin is one of my dearest friends and
colleagues, and I am ecstatic to say he will be creating a
retrospective on some of the most important and influential artists
who created work here in New York City, with an emphasis on
underground art and public art and the kinds of movements that are
being seeded as we speak. However, he will not be doing this alone.
Four lucky students of mine will be joining him in organizing this
colossal event, which will be the first of its kind.”
    “Say what ?” Kendra whispered loudly.
“I want in on that!”
    “Shhh.” I nudged her, eager to hear more.
    “Now, as you all know, I teach everyone from
undergraduates to PhD candidates in art history, so there is going
to be quite a bit of competition for these positions. The president
of our school, as well as other prestigious alumni, will be closely
involved. Our