When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,47

“He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching artwork to decor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as “the Navajo,” and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.

My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.

My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead my parents to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of Mr. Creech,” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”

I was in my second year of college by then and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”

“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of him.”

As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in ARTnews rather than Artforum, their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t listen. Maybe today my art history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at Van Gogh!”

“So will every artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a bus tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”

“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough to just be dead. You’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your artwork doesn’t look like art.”

“And you’re the expert on that?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.

I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing — things requiring actual skill — but even my later conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge — in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.

I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and I started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the 1800s, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century. Monkey Eating Peaches, Man Fleeing a Burning Village, Figures Tormented by Devils in Hell — how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor — sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers — but if I say their