Read Off Course for Free Online Page B

“it doesn’t matter what anyone says.”
    â€œI don’t know about calling,” Cress said. “I just liked making it.” She’d applied to Pratt and Cal Arts, anyway, she said, and got into Cal Arts, but without any financial aid. In econ, she got into all four places she’d applied, probably because female applicants were so scarce. Iowa gave her a three-year fellowship. Her boyfriend there, John Bird, was also an economist. But that’s it. No more economists for her. And once she was done with the diss, no more econ either.
    â€œSo you’ll go back to painting?”
    â€œI don’t know.” For her dissertation, she planned to write about the economics of art, how the work accrues value. She’d posed certain questions, then tried to answer them: for example, what brings more value, a good review or a sold-out show? A major prize or a museum purchase? A museum retrospective or the artist’s death? She’d spent last summer in Chicago talking to gallery owners and museum directors, who were as interested as she was in the answers. The market realities were sobering and could chill any artist’s ardor. “The best thing an artist can do is die,” Cress told Julie. “Nothing raises prices more than death.”
    The death line usually made people laugh, but Julie Garsh had no discernible sense of humor. She pursed her thin lips. Then, panting as she trotted to keep up, she said to Cress pretty much what everyone else did: “Just finish the dissertation. Then you can do whatever you want.”
    *   *   *
    In the morning, waiflike Franny appeared at the A-frame’s sliding glass doors with a vacuum cleaner. The top of her head didn’t reach the standing bear’s nose smears. “Your mom says I have to clean, ’cause her and your dad’s coming up.”
    â€œI guess she doesn’t trust my housekeeping.”
    â€œThat’s what she said.” Franny hauled the hose and canister inside.
    Cress didn’t want to lie around reading New Yorker s while Franny worked, so she sat at the card table and took out a file, scrolled a sheet of paper into the Selectric. CHAPTER ONE , she wrote at the top of the page, and under that The Problem of Value in Art. Okay now. Start. Determining the utility of visual art has always been a difficult discussion. Too much, too vague, and she probably shouldn’t begin with a term like “utility,” which means something different in econo-talk than in English—not if she ever wanted to publish this as a popular (as opposed to an academic) book. She yanked out the paper, balled it up, tossed it into the fireplace, and twirled in a fresh sheet. The intrinsic value of art may be incalculable, but the price of art tends to be linked directly to market realities. Nope. Too big a bite. Yank, crumple, and toss. How art accrues value in the marketplace is only subjective at the beginning. Better, more grabbing. But soft, soft. Into the flames!
    â€œBingo,” said Franny, who’d been watching from the loft.

 
    Four
    â€œOh Cress. What have you done?”
    In seventeen years, the cabin had filled up. Sylvia Hartley had a reputation, well deserved, for being a gourmet cook—an achievement, given her famously cheap husband—and people bore that in mind when buying her a gift. Her refrain for every too-specialized gewgaw or arcane gadget was We’ll take it to the cabin! In the packed drawers and cupboards of the A-frame’s kitchen—itself just a small corner of the front room—could be found tortoiseshell caviar spoons, a shuddery electric knife, a tortilla press, clay butter molds, a fish poacher, three pedestal cake plates, an ebelskiver skillet, an oven mitt in the shape of a salmon, and linen dish towels from Stratford-upon-Avon and the San Diego Zoo. Crowding the space was an enormous pickling crock holding a decade-old