This Dog for Hire by Carol Lea Benjamin Page A

had he lived long enough for the gallery to actually install it.
    I thought about the coolness in his paintings, perhaps because he felt apart from his natural family, felt Magritte, of rising son , and his other heirs, Louis and Dennis, were his real family. If he left the paintings to Louis, he must have felt good about the relationship, at least at the time the codicil was written.
    I picked up the gallery contract. How much of the post-eighties art world bust of the pay-the-piper nineties was reflected in Clifford Cole’s contract with the Cahill Gallery I didn’t know. I had never read a gallery contract before. I knew that a lot of the SoHo galleries had closed, and the remaining ones were often empty, run by people as desperate as the woman who had followed me around the Dots installation at Cahill earlier in the day. I have always found it amusing when someone tries to talk you into buying a so-called piece of art that costs more than your yearly gross.
    There were still some wonderful things to see in the downtown galleries, works like Clifford Cole’s that would linger in memory, where the range and ability of the artist actually merited the space his work occupied. Unfortunately, much of what was on display for eighties prices made me want to call the bunko squad. But there’s no such thing, other than for forgery, in the art world. It’s not a crime to produce derivative, dull, or simply poor “works,” as the contract calls what the artist produces. It’s simply a matter of taste.
    Clifford’s first contract was surprisingly short and simple, free of the jargon of wills, mortgages, and divorce documents. The gallery would determine the price, and the artist could not sell comparable works for less. The gallery would receive 50 percent not only of the price of works sold at the exhibition it would install but of any sales made by the artist from his studio that were a direct result of the representation and the exhibition at the Cahill Gallery, and even any nonrelated sales made out of the artist’s studio for the duration of the agreement, which was one year. It was sort of the same deal real estate brokers love home owners to sign, stating that if the owner sells his home during the time of the broker’s contract, even in cases where the broker has done nothing but sit on her ass and never advertised or shown the house, she will still receive 6 percent of the sale price. Nice work if you can get it.
    The Cahill Gallery got first pick of all of Cliff’s art, which meant that Cliff—now Louis—couldn’t sell anything without giving the Cahill Gallery half the money, even if they never gave Clifford a show. I wondered what Leonard Polski would do with his inheritance. I hadn’t seen most of the paintings. They were draped and standing in a huge storage closet opposite the den, and the light in the closet didn’t work. Next time I’d bring a flashlight and look at the rest of Leonard’s loot.
    I flipped through Clifford’s address book. There were lots of names of galleries, other places he had probably sent a padded manila envelope with his résumé, slides, SASE, and lots of hope. I liked his work a lot better than much of what I see in SoHo, but there was no way I could judge if it ever would have become hot enough to sell. Often that has as much to do with an artist’s life or who he knows as it has to do with his ability or originality.
    I wondered if Clifford had gotten depressed about his inability to sell his “works.” He had probably been elated the day he signed the contract. That had been November 16, which would mean he had been working on things for his show since then. There had been no date set, no promise of how soon it would be or how many of his works would be included. Most shows were up for a three-week period, during which there would be an opening, often stacked with the artist’s friends and