9.

□ When it was time to meet the buyer who’d been interested in Liska’s paintings, Anna Lunken asked us to dress as smartly as we could. We had all heard of Mr Sharma and the wonders he could produce in turning artists into financially viable entities — a most difficult proposition — and we agreed to go to his place of work to see what he was offering. As for smart, it was not a thing that we could manage. We took our quest to the charity shops, but even there were uselessly confined by our means.

There was art everywhere in Mr Sharma’s office — art to aestheticise the material security of his company and art to prove that he had taste. Art had a few other functions but Mr Sharma wasn’t used to them. He would never, for example, have considered art as an investment — a crudity he believed — and he would never sponsor an artist in order to meet a potential tax liability. Instead, Mr Sharma liked to make his artists commercially viable, although how he did this was a sacred mystery. The art in Mr Sharma’s office had been selected on how well its shape and colour accorded to the space. His company was a firm of commodity managers, and behind the black hemisphere of their desks, men and women configured the price of something — I don’t know what.

Here is a connection, I thought, horrified at my appearance in this sink of corporate strategy. Like many other offices, it was, as far as I could see, a graveyard of art and artists — in short, non-spaces domesticated with dead images.

Liska and I were seated beside Anna Lunken and were brought tea by assistants. There was a red seascape by Joseph Harper called Modal Tides and underneath, a print of the bed-ridden John Bellany, dreaming of the golden city of his fridge as a gang of hooded seabirds gave him the colourcast eye from the rocks outside his window. Around the doors was more art — one called White Writing by Somebody Gordon and a zig-zag of shapes called Pink Pink Prison.

“I’ve become extraordinarily sensitive to painting,” said Anna Lunken while we sat beneath this inevitably anodyne collection. Anna Lunken talked of ongoing studio relationships, and the jewels of her eyes were wet with delight.

“They have eight thousand square feet of empty wall space in the average office,” she said, “and nobody is ever delegated to find art for it. Most of the art here is produced by Mr Sharma’s own studio. Mr Sharma offers artists unlimited funding. It’s all about talented young people.”

A folder was produced and in it were the schematic explanations typical to business. We stared at the name of our benefactor, Mr Sharma, whose card rose out of this eddy of paper and was placed in both our hands.

“If you know Mr Sharma,” said Anna Lunken, “you’ll know that he’s succeeded where everyone else has failed. His studio supports and nurtures artists while ensuring that the artists get paid. It’s an entire experience.”

Liska gripped my hand. Past the glare of fluorescent light a stylish woman pointed a light pen along some production targets. Shadows were flattened so there was no depth anywhere and both Liska and I were both thinking of the same thing — the suicidal last words of good old George Eastman:

To my friends — my work is done.

Why wait?

What else could make the synthetic world of the office real, I thought, other than the dream-created forces of art?

While we waited for Mr Sharma, Liska and myself did the honest thing and gazed at the pictures on the wall with the gravity of the pre-destined, and waited for the full detail of the economic performance that united artists with money, and money with art.