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Another Death in Venice Dominic Eichler You can imagine my surprise to learn that I have been pronounced dead. I felt that I had to warn you before getting too wound up in my story. But I can also reassure you that my expiry is quite as concocted as my fabled liveliness. You will never hear the dissonant notes and abandoned symphonies that occupied me during my entire illusory life – though it is art, not music, which brings us together now. I would introduce myself properly, but I have no name to offer. There are plenty of questionable ideas out there about people like me. Occasionally, I recognize myself amongst them. To most, I am simply a 'gay art collector' – a mythic creature the general public happily pretends to have once met or ignorantly propose to understand, and all too often in a disparaging way. Do you know the feeling just after the end of an affair, when the much pawed over 'other' fades from view to retreat into the fictional? I confess my library is rather full of these nonfictions, and I myself am in the library of many others – if only like one of Joe Orton's scandalous collages. Yours if you like. Look me up. In the late 1980s. I read Alan Hollinghurst's archaeological novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, and found parts of myself in nearly all of his characters too, even though London was never my thing. Too many people there are so bitten and biting back. What do I look like? In my mind, I am still as fluid and dapper as the sinless Dorian depicted in a painting I own by Vibeke Slyngstad.... That picture feels at least partly true to my sense of myself and is a bulwark against the evidence to the contrary in retail mirrors or in other people's expressions when it's late and we've overindulged. Just when you get used to something about yourself there is always a small change. In a single evening you can play out your entire life. It's probably conceited to let an artist paint you – and afterwards buy her efforts. Then again, artists aren't naïve, and I suppose they bank on things working out when they render a collector – though that can go horribly wrong. [...] Katalogauszug |