HEADHUNTERS
Surviving February and losing five pounds, Charles hoped March would bring springtime. It didn’t. At six-one, Charles Bloom usually weighed 195. He had a head of brown full, thick hair, green eyes, and sharp features. Unfortunately, his new leaner physique was secondary to a mixture of poor calorie/nutrient intake, lack of monetary funds, and mild depression. Cutting out fast food to save on money has a funny way of helping to keep one trim. The ironic thought of losing weight from mild starvation made Bloom consider writing his first art book, The Art Dealer’s Diet: How To Lose Weight Without Trying. Main ingredient: no retail sales. It’s just that easy. The thought should have made Charles laugh, but there were still four months to go before the July opera season and he doubted his book would make Oprah’s book list before then.
March looked grimmer than last month if that was possible. The snow had rarely come to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, only a thin sheet of continuous ice. Even his favorite chile peddler from Chimayo hadn’t ventured by the gallery as everyone was staying off the roads, which were coated with black ice. A large ever-growing icicle was draped along one corner of Charles’ pitched-roof gallery. Charles knew it was a real danger if it fell when someone happened to be near the massive ice block, which was growing like a steroid-induced stalactite of frozen water. But it wasn’t like customers were flocking to his door. Charles’ inquisitive nature just loved to see the ice sculpture mature. So every day he watched the progress, wondering if the ice extremity would fully extend to the frozen ground or if Mother Nature would have its way and destroy the only visitor Charles seemed to have these days.
Finally, on a rare sunny day with the afternoon temperature hovering around freezing, the answer came. Two white-necked ravens had landed on the top of the roof and were helping themselves to a little drink of the thawing water, when a huge crash broke the calm of the day. The smashing sound of the ice breaking into a thousand pieces on the frozen ground below and the two screaming birds whose own lives had been startled echoed down the empty Canyon Road side street. Charles wondered if anyone even heard the huge noise, or if all the art gallery owners were in Arizona for an early spring break.
Normally, Charles loved Canyon Road. Santa Fe’s legendary art lane was like Facebook on mezcal, with its odd connections formed by artists, collectors, locals, gallery owners, and tourists all with one thing in common: a deep appreciation for art and creativity. But this March it was still bone-chilling cold and activity on Canyon Road had largely ceased. No artist would ever send new artwork to a city in hibernation. The narrow street leading into the entrance of Bloom’s was icy with a permanent slickness that never seemed to relent no matter how much salt was applied. Charles’ 15-year-old Mercedes had started rusting badly this year, and was the only thing the salt seemed to have worked on. The Mercedes was the last remnant of glory days gone by, when Bloom’s represented the premiere modern Native artist west of the Mississippi. Looking at his old car just reminded Bloom of how far his business had tanked.
The one sliver of good news was that the fall green chile crop had been a banner one. No shortage of fresh cheap chile. That was actually excellent news for Bloom, who loved fresh chile in everything he cooked, especially the variety from Chimayo, a small town north of Santa Fe. Chimayo was better known for its weavings and famous church, El Santuario de Chimayo with its healing dirt, than its chiles. Chimayo green chiles have a very distinctive flavor that is absorbed from the sacred thick brownish-red dirt they grow in. They are particularly hot, christened by the locals as “tourist killers.” Having grown up in New Mexico and lived in Santa Fe for so long, Bloom had become accustomed to the extreme heat found in Chimayo green chile, not the mild stuff out of Albuquerque or Hatch. For a white kid, he could hang with his toughest Hispanic friends when it came to eating ass-burning green chiles.
The thought of the unique aroma of roasting fresh chile made Bloom’s mouth start to water, but even cheap fresh green chile was a luxury. It wasn’t that Charles Bloom was poor. It was that all his money was tied up in the form of art. Not a particularly liquid asset unless you want to blow the inventory out, so you waited. In March, you waited a lot.
The winter routine for the gallery was unchanging. First order of business: get a fire going to keep electric and gas usage to a minimum. After the old adobe gallery was warm enough to function, emails were answered, and new ones sent out to potential clients. Charles Bloom’s limited inventory of dead artists and the few fairly new paintings had been sent to every possible name in his database, so email time was now more surfing the web and checking the weather channel on canyonroadarts.com.
Noon was a quick phone call to his best friend, Brad Shriver. Charles and Brad had met at a Santa Fe Gallery Association meeting, when Brad was new in town. Charles had given Brad plenty of advice over the years about Santa Fe’s best realtors and restaurants and magazines in which to advertise. Upon opening his Upper Deck Gallery on the downtown Plaza, overlooking the Palace of the Governors, Brad had become Charles’s barometer of tourist action.
The Palace of the Governors is the longest-occupied government building in the United States, since 1610. It’s a huge adobe building prominently positioned on the north side of the historic Plaza, and it’s where all the territorial governors made their residence. The country of occupation changed every 100 years or so. First it was the Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States, but all kept the same central building as their home office.
The Palace of the Governors has a huge overhanging roof, or portal, which is used as a shelter for the Native American artist vendors allowed to participate in a daily outdoor arts and crafts show there. To get one of the coveted spots under the Governor’s portal, you first had to be a New Mexico Pueblo Indian and secondarily you had to basically inherit the position, not be some one-sixteenth Cherokee whose family had only been in New Mexico for 60 years. These Indians had been around New Mexico for 1,000 years. No spot for the Bloom lineage ever, unless he managed to marry one of the vendors. These individuals looked like real Indians and the tourists ate it up.
The Indians often would dress in traditional clothing and turquoise jewelry, bundled in colorful Pendleton blankets with their backs against the building’s warm south-facing wall. On a cold day the Native vendors would all huddle together. For most of the Indians under the portal, this is where their life played out. First it would be as a young child not ready for school, sitting next to a parent trying to make a living, dressed identically in traditional clothing and jewelry. Once in school, it was a summer job helping the family. Now those same children were adults with their own children following in the ancestral footsteps, taking travelers checks from the Japanese.
Watching the tourists negotiate with the Indians for their wares never got old for Bloom. When business was good, Bloom would go to lunch with Brad at the Plaza Café, getting a good window seat to watch the Indian opera. The tourists always seemed to flow the same way, east to west. There was no reason, no signs saying “go this way,” but it was always the same. They moved like the sun. Many of the tourists were from other countries and loved to take photos and negotiate with the best negotiators in the world. The tourists always felt they had taken advantage of the poor Indians, but in reality many of the Indians drove better cars than their clients did.
Today’s phone report from the Upper Deck Gallery was fairly bad. Just a few overweight European-looking tourists, probably Germans (they loved the West).
“Sorry Charles, just a few stragglers passing through. Be thankful you don’t have my rent to pay. Why don’t you just shut down for a couple of weeks and take a break. Now’s the time, you won’t be losing any business.”
Charles pondered the option. “I’m just burning through the last of my capital staying open. Maybe I should. If I took off, would you want a nice Scholder painting and a decent Cannon woodblock for a month? See if you can have better luck in your overpriced Park Avenue gallery?”
“Sure thing,” Brad quickly agreed. “Is it the Scholder with the large, dark, brooding purple Indian from the late seventies, with the shitty frame?”
“Yep, that’s it. Not sure why it hasn’t sold, it’s a great piece and the seventies were an excellent time period for his work. It’s probably the frame. I wish I had the money to put on a frame worthy of its price tag. I’ve got $68K on it. We could split over my cost, which was $35K. That would give you plenty of room. The Cannon is the one with the Indian sitting in the living room. It’s got a small tear on one side, but I had it conserved back when I had a little money and you can’t see the repair hidden under the mat. It’s worth about $12K and I’ve only got $2K in it. We could split anything over $6K. You unfortunately would still have to sit here in frozen land hoping for a live one and continuing to waste your electricity.”
“Hey, I never turn down free quality inventory. Let me know when you want to come over and I’ll clear a wall. Any problem if I were to put them on my website?”
“That’s fine. I could take them off my site. I would be shocked if anyone has visited that site in a month, unless it’s the other galleries checking to see if I have finally gone out of business and wanting to poach my gallery’s Canyon Road address.”
“Charles, you’ve got the retail blues. I get them sometimes, especially when your dick clients offer you less then what you paid for a piece and you start thinking about taking it. Speaking of offering you less than what you want for something, you don’t happen to have any Yellowhorse pieces stuck away? I have a serious buyer who just wants an example for his marginal collection, headhunter-type guy and it’s pretty much a sure deal.”
Charles knew all about headhunters. Headhunting is when a collector buys paintings for the signature on the piece, not for the art. These individuals are not serious art connoisseurs, even though they can spend a lot of money. Usually a headhunter would fill his own order at some second-rate auction in which a dealer dumped a crappy picture by a good-named artist. The collector is proud he has such a great artist in his collection and the dealer can’t believe he got so much for the piece. But due to his premature death, even a marginal Yellowhorse would still bring a ton at auction so it was hard for any collector to fill his need for mediocrity.
“Sorry, Brad. I haven’t had any of Willard’s work since before his death. I have one little painting left, but it was done for me so I’m hanging on to it. You know I really liked him and would never be able to replace it.”
“Yeah, I know. He was just a terrific artist. What a shame he died so young, barely 30 if I remember right. How about that dick dealer who stole him from you in New York City? Any chance he’s got anything squirreled away?”
“I don’t talk to him, but my understanding is he ran out a few years ago except for the infamous death piece he’s selling at Sotheby’s contemporary sale in May. Everything now is just what comes on the secondary market or auction. I could make a call or two and see if I can break something loose from one of my old clients. Your collector is a sure thing? I would hate to burn one of my few remaining clients who still have a Yellowhorse I sold them. You can understand my hesitancy on a maybe sale?”
“Yep,” Brad assured, “this guy’s a classic headhunter. Could give a shit about what it looks like. It just has to be signed and real. He probably maxes out around $50K.”
“Won’t get much of a piece at today’s prices, you realize that?”
“Yeah, I know Yellowhorse has gone through the roof. Sorry I didn’t get a piece when he was still showing with you. You kept telling me I was missing the boat. Same old thing, seemed like there would be time enough to get one later and I knew his only dealer well.”
“I know the feeling, Brad, I didn’t put any away other than the one he gave me. Who could have predicted Willard Yellowhorse would have dumped me and then offed himself? I never saw that coming. It still seems unbelievable. It always was fishy to me. That last so-called piece STRUGGLE is nothing more than a morose artifact of Willard’s death.”
“Yeah, pretty trippy the way he killed himself. Insured him a place in the art-history books though. You going to New York to watch the big boy sell?”
“I doubt I’ll have the cash. New York is so damn expensive and the only way is if one of my clients wants me to bid on it or my Scholder sells. I got one client, a multimillionaire, who called and I told him I would be happy to go for him, preview the painting, but he just wanted a free over-the-phone assessment. I told him it would probably be a very good investment but in my opinion very bad karma. Something was wrong mentally when Willard made that piece. It was just not a Yellowhorse in the truest sense. My client thought I was full of shit and told me in a condescending voice that karma was for fools, not businessmen. All he cared about was what it was going to be worth in five years.” Talking about Willard’s death made Charles even more upset. “This collector is your worse nightmare! He buys a painting from some dealer or little auction, then gets worried he overpaid, or the piece wasn’t right, and the phone calls and emails start with images of his latest find. God help you if he gets an answer he didn’t want to hear, like he overpaid for the piece. Then he wants to know who the expert in the field is. Anytime a Yellowhorse came up for sale at auction he always called and grilled me about the piece. After the auction, if it sold for too much or less than what I thought, I would get another call, `Why don’t you know your own market?’”
“Bloom, that Mr. Dick Head client probably won’t be paying your meal ticket to the big city. Don’t you know as a dealer you are supposed to kiss ass and tell the guy what he wants to hear even if it’s bullshit? Then charge him to go to the auction, stay in a great hotel, eat at expensive restaurants, and bid the damn piece up so he has to pay more for it then he should have!”
Bloom sighed, “We are getting cynical—and only in our forties.”
“You’re right, this fucked-up winter has me on edge too and if a live one comes in here, he’s toast. So come over here with your secondary shit, and get out of town for a few weeks! Hey, good news, a bus load of Orientals, probably Japanese, just got dropped off in front of the Plaza. Maybe I’ll go down and see if I can round them up. Get that Scholder over here now!” Brad hung up.
Charles’ first thought was maybe he should run the damn paintings over there right now. Might get lucky. The yen was high against the dollar these days. But Charles Bloom was a responsible man who always looked for the good in others, and he was going to take his time making any big changes.