Soho Sins
By Richard Vine
Titan Books
384 pages, $22.99
Art and money are inextricably linked in many of our minds. How much a painting has been bought and sold for often seems more interesting than the painting itself. From there it is only a quick mental step sideways to associate art with crime. Artists are imagined to be cunning charlatans, art dealers repeatedly turn out to be peddlers in forgeries, and no less an expert than Pablo Picasso was quite straightforward: “Good artists copy,” he said, “great artists steal.”
This is the background against which Richard Vine, the hugely respected art expert and long-time managing editor of Art in America has written his latest book. But SoHo Sins is no dry analytical tome. Much more engagingly it is a murder mystery. A wealthy art collector is found shot to death in a pool of blood. Her husband confesses to the crime, despite the fact that he was apparently on the other side of the country when the killing took place. Vine sets his story in 1990s SoHo, “precisely when and where the art world’s utter corruption by big money took hold,” he explains. “It marks the transition from high seriousness to high prices and low motives.”
Even before he had a clear sense of how it might evolve, Vine found the book beginning to write itself. Exasperated by what he calls “the academic woodenness and pretense” that he found himself having to deal with as an editor, he began drafting up accounts of the art world in the hardboiled language of classic detective fiction. “To me, the hardboiled style is pure American poetry,” he says, “a cultural expression on a par with jazz and the blues.”
Vine’s own “pure American poetry” is made all the more intriguing because the world he describes – the “coolly amoral downtown scene” – is real, and many of the characters that people it are composites of actual people that Vine has known. One or two are drawn directly from life. A character known as The Viking is “based on my friend the Icelandic sculptor Gudjon Bjarnason,” Vine reveals. “Not only is Gudjon big and blond and hard-drinking, he really does make his work by blowing up steel beams with dynamite.”
A book with characters like the Viking is clearly going to be a hugely entertaining page-turner, but Vine gives his readers a good deal to think about long after they have set the novel aside. He is fascinated, for example, by murder and how it is represented in fiction. “A couple of people get offed,” he says, “which launches individual inquiries into individual deaths. But, as is always implicitly true in noir fiction as I read it, the real culprit is death itself. ‘Why does anyone die?’ the private eye Hogan asks – and so does every reader of this genre. Human mortality makes no sense. We are all the victims of a metaphysical crime – or sick joke. Can you blame us for wanting to investigate?”
Now we have the opportunity to meet Richard Vine and hear him talking about his book and the experiences that prompted him to write it. Saturday evening August 6, The School in Kinderhook is hosting a champagne reception, lecture and book signing. If you’ve ever thought that “the contemporary art world is in many respects a criminal enterprise,” then you shouldn’t miss it, for this is exactly the sort of idea that Richard Vine will be exploring. “The book is dark, really dark,” he admits, “but I hope that won’t keep readers from seeing its humor. A wise-cracking SoHo art dealer gets led by the nose by a child. That’s hilarious, but also frightening. That duality is key, because humor is the closest thing we now have to redemption.”
