Two couples, dinner guests at the plate-drop, the Diamonds and the DeSilvas, called separately, expressing concern, pretending to sympathize. “You must be under a lot of pressure.” And they suggested to Minor Watt that if there were any other items in his collection that he wanted to get rid of, they would be glad to accept them. He’d smashed the plates, therefore — their reasoning went — he didn’t care about them, and would probably hand over a precious object for nothing or very little.
“But I do care,” Minor Watt said after he’d hung up. “That’s why I did it.”
You do something spontaneously, perhaps accidentally, with no thought of the consequences, he thought, and sometimes you’re surprised at what you’ve provoked. His roofing career leading to real estate had proven that. Smashing china was a revelation, and a cure.
The Diamonds said they had always been very fond of Minor Watt’s Tang celadon bowl, smuggled out of Cambodia, perhaps stolen from the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The man who’d sold it to him had remarked on its solidity, how this thick piece of pottery had survived through twelve centuries.
“That piece could take a direct hit.”
Minor Watt had always smiled, and felt small and somewhat in awe, remembering those words. He invited the Diamonds for tea. He called attention to the jade-colored glaze, the inimitable crackle, and allowed them to salivate at the prospect of the gift — they were actually swallowing, gulping in anticipation. Then he asked them to put on protective goggles. “You’ll see it better.” Humoring him — he was insane, wasn’t he? — they put them on, and Minor Watt took a hammer to the bowl and, with his tongue clamped in his teeth, pounded the celadon to dust.
The DeSilvas had hinted on the phone of their liking for an Edward Lear watercolor of the Nile depicting Kasr el-Saidi among some riverside palms. These people, too, pleased to be invited for tea, let their covetous gaze wander over the painting.
“The color is brighter without the glass,” Minor Watt said, and removed the painting from its frame. He served tea, and after filling their cups he dribbled the pot of hot tea over the watercolor, as the man held his sobbing wife.
Minor Watt said, “Sorry,” as mockery, but he thought, Of course I know what I’m doing. Power over works of art that he owned, but also power over these people. He had the power to terrorize them, too, without ever touching them.
Each thing he destroyed strengthened him; each person he terrified through his destruction made him someone to be feared. It had never been his intention; it was all a revelation. Money had no meaning anymore. He’d amassed his art collection believing it would inspire respect — and it had, to a degree; and it had inspired envy, too. The assumption in New York was that he would eventually give the collection to a museum. To these people, and perhaps to a museum, these objects represented wealth — the absurd bias toward money. Even a museum would not regard them as collectors’ items, one of a kind. These days a museum would sell them, to stay afloat, and Minor Watt would be forgotten. It disgusted him to think that, transformed into money, they were replaceable. The collector’s conceit was always that he or she was a temporary custodian.
“No — I am the owner — the last owner!” Minor Watt said.
Destroying them meant that he was the equal of the person who made them — more than that, he was more powerful. He wiped these rare things from the face of the earth, leaving only a memory in which he mattered; and a memory was the more evocative, even mystical, for its vagueness. After centuries of use and veneration, of being handled and crated and resold, catalogued, photographed, admired, the small thin-rimmed jade bowl balanced on Minor Watt’s fingers, in his lovely kitchen, before the blinking eyes of the museum curator, was tipped into a blender. And before the man could react, Minor Watt clapped the lid on and poked the button labeled Liquefy.
More ingenious in devising ways to destroy these works of art, each one appropriate to the object, his intention was to make the destruction as memorable as the object itself: the memory of its extinction.
He had some supporters, all of them art students, video artists, creators of installations, one who worked with decaying food, another with human blood, who interpreted Minor Watt’s destruction as a form of art, a kind of ritual theater, performance art. They sent him letters. They praised him for turning his back on art history to create something new.
“You are a total hero,” one of them said — a pretty purple-haired woman, very thin, black fingernails, neck tattoo, torn black clothes, greasy boots.
Her praise alarmed him, though her look kept him watching. She had come with a group to his uptown office. He had agreed to meet them in the foyer, his security people in attendance.
“You got a Rauschenberg?” a man in the group asked — spiky hair, mascara, the same boots.
“An early one,” Minor Watt said. “Birds, animals.”
“Wipe it! Whack it! Know what Rauschenberg did? Bought a de Kooning drawing and erased it. Erased it! Exhibited it as his own work. It’s in a museum. Is that radical?”
“You’re way beyond that, man. You’re like a whole new movement — iconoclasm.”
He smiled and sent them away. Iconoclasm was nothing new. The word had been in use for five centuries. Minor Watt continued destroying because destruction itself gave him a greater appetite for shattering a whole lovely thing. The breaking of each piece meant the breaking of a barrier that admitted him to a region of cold ferocity. The act of destruction had nothing to do with art. He laughed at the students who claimed his destruction as a form of conceptual art. No, he went on breaking his collection because — he felt sure — he had entered a realm of self-indulgence he’d never guessed at before. He was gluttonous for more. He was not an artist, he was a child smashing a doll, and he was also a ruler punishing a province, a tyrant carrying out a massacre. He did it with a smile, and knew that the great destroyers were smilers — destruction was the certain proof of wealth.
He went on smiling and never uttered the simple truth that he had discovered: “No matter how outrageous my assault on art, no one can stop me.”
He still bought art. And at auctions, when he saw how passionately someone wanted to acquire something, he wagged a finger and outbid them. Later, he contrived ways to show these people that he’d destroyed the thing they had craved. Other bidders hated to see him enter at a sale, but he could not be banned — and he knew that the auctioneers were secretly pleased that he was bidding, because he bid without limit.
Who could prevent him from destroying a thing he owned? He jeered at his critics. “You’d think I was committing murder!” It was worse than murder for some of these people. And these were the same people who’d stood by, indifferent to the cruelty of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan — stoning women to death for adultery, hacking the hands from thieves, and after Friday prayers, the beheadings. And who cared? But when the Taliban dynamited the sixth-century giant standing Buddhas in Bamiyan, these hypocrites howled in pain, demanding military action, the overthrow of the Taliban, the siege of Kabul — and it had happened!
But Minor Watt now understood the Taliban, and their earlier incarnation, the White Huns of the fifth century, who’d taken their saddle axes to the Buddhas and stupas of Gandhara, not far from Bamiyan. (He had such an ax, a tabar-i-zin, with Victory from God and Imminent Conquest engraved in gold on its blade in Persian. He used it on one of his Hockneys.) What lay behind these furious acts of purification was a demonstration of will. Never had these destroyers seemed stronger, fiercer, less sentimental, more resolute, more intent in their mission: inaccessible, unappeasable figures of pure horror and domination. It was certain that invaders or rulers who would dynamite a beautiful work of art placed a much lower value on human life, because artworks were one of a kind and people were pretty much the same. Even those people whom Minor Watt knew seemed to feel this way.