between the two bills created by social consensus, a few people had left, saying, “It’s just an elaborate put-on.”
But the others, who stuck it out, were next confronted with a dollar bill hung in a museum as “found” art. Williams, the extraterrestrial, wanted to know whether its value was the same as, greater than, or less than it had been before being hung in the museum.
More people lost their tempers in the course of his discussion.
But Williams persisted. Still playing extraterrestrial, he wanted to know if it made any difference if the dollar hung in the museum as “found” art had been printed by the Treasury or by the criminal gang.
After a few minutes of this topic most of the people in the room were jumping up and down like the Ambassador who found the Rehnquist on the stairs.
Williams had no mercy. He next wanted them to explain the difference between any or all of the above and an exact duplicate of any or all of them painted by Roy Lichtenstein and exhibited as Pop Art.
After a half hour more he pointed out that they were arguing among themselves even more than they were attempting to explain these mysteries to him. He also mentioned, not too cruelly, that many of them had arrived at the state where they seemed to believe their definitions would become more convincing if they just repeated them at a louder decibel level.
Williams then gave up the extraterrestrial game and tried to restore order. He became droll and told them the old story of how Picasso, asked to identify the real Picassos in a group of possible fakes, had put one of his own canvases among the fraudulent group. “But,” an art dealer among those present protested, “I saw you paint that one myself, Pablo.”
“No matter,” said the Great Man imperturbably, “I can fake a Picasso as well as anybody.”
He reminded them that Andy Warhol kept a closet full of Campbell’s soup cans, and gave autographed cans to people he liked so they could own “a genuine Warhol.” He pointed out, after the laugh subsided, that neither extraterrestrials nor terrestrials could agree on the difference in value between a Treasury dollar signed by Warhol and thereby becoming “a genuine Warhol,” a counterfeit dollar signed by Warhol for the purpose—giving “a genuine Warhol” to a friend, a Treasury dollar with Warhol’s signature forged by El Mir, a Treasury dollar with Warhol’s signature forged by an unknown criminal, and a counterfeit dollar with Warhol’s signature forged by William S. Burroughs, the founder of Neo-Cubist painting.
He said that Ethnomethodologists knew that the border between the Real and the Unreal was not fixed, but just marked the last place where rival gangs of shamans had fought each other to a stalemate. He said the border had shifted after each major conceptual struggle, as national borders shift after military struggles. He defined everybody who attempted to define Reality, including himself, as a conscious or unconscious co-conspirator with some gang of shamans who are trying to impose their game on the rest of us.
He said that both the economics of art and the art of economics were determined by shamans, whether they knew themselves as shamans or not.
“Crazy as a bedbug,” said the last man to quit the room.
The remainder were staring at Williams with devout awe. They felt that he had removed great murky shadows from their minds and brought them forward into the light.
Williams had made some Converts.
He settled back in an easy chair—he had been standing in his Full Professor lecture-room style through most of this—and got chatty and informal. He told them the little-known story of Pope Stephen’s parable to the Spanish Cardinal who had told him that “seeking for the Real” was pointless since the Real is palpably right in front of our noses.
“Everybody knows,” Pope Stephen had said, “that I studied singing and medicine before I decided to make the priesthood my life’s work. What few know is that I also considered becoming a novelist. I often wonder, myself, if I ever abandoned that last ambition. Sometimes I feel like a novelist pretending to be a Pope, to see what it’s like. And sometimes I even think the whole Church is a very old novel which I’ve revised and modernized. And, my reverend brother in Christ, sometimes I even think that I’m not alone in this novel-writing business; I think that every man, woman, and child on this planet is writing a novel inside their heads,