Portrait of a White Boyfriend

Fiction

Basquiat, Dos Cabezas, 1982.

It’s the middle of August and I’m already sweating through my Banana Republic linen shirt as I arrive at the Chelsea art gallery. Everyone smells like Blue de Chanel and Chloe by Chloe. The DJ plays mid-2000s electronic trip-hop like Aural Float, with no bassline, and people nod like they get it. I’m wearing secondhand Saint Laurent sunglasses and pretending not to be hungover. I’m here because my boyfriend Fallon’s art is on display. I’d rather be in bed than forcibly social with his nepo baby and crypto tech bro friends. I’d rather my own art be on display, but I’m a college dropout with no art world connections, no Annina Nosei to offer me a basement studio under her SoHo gallery on Prince Street. I instead have a white boyfriend who is also broke, but thanks to a Parsons scholarship, knows all the right people to land him in this gallery for his first showing, and now I’m playing the role of supportive boyfriend. I weave through the crowd of Todd Snyder black jeans, Doc Martens, Aritzia dresses, and brosexuals in Issey Miyake, to find the gallery’s pièce de résistance, my boyfriend’s abstract painting that looks like a police blood splatter analysis. Or formally, abstract impressionism.

It was an art gallery where we first met. Well, an art gallery of sorts. It was at Frevo on West 8th, a clandestine restaurant tucked behind an unassuming storefront art gallery, where three previously unseen Richard Corman portraits of Basquiat from ’84 were on display. You enter the gallery, whisper a password to a bouncer, and you’re whisked into a speakeasy restaurant. I was there on one of the rare writing assignments I’m usually tossed when a staff writer has a conflict. I was mid-interview with Chef Franco when one of his regulars interrupted us. At first, I was annoyed at this rude white boy starting a convo as if I wasn’t even there! Until I saw those bright blue eyes. Piercingly bright blue. “Aquamarine,” he likes to tell people with a grin to assert dominance in a conversation. I was taken by his sharp jaw. His shampoo commercial blonde hair. His surprisingly deep voice when he flashed me a dopey smile and finally said, “Sorry for interrupting.” He offered to buy me a drink and go on the record in my article about the fight Justin and Hailey Bieber had there a couple of weeks prior. “My mom spends too much money here for him to ban me for gossiping about the clientele,” Fallon said, resting his hand on my back as he led me to the bar. We talked for hours. He was unemployed, pursuing a career as a painter, and living in a Lower East Side restaurant with three roommates, nineteen roommates if you counted the number of roaches I’d spotted since we started dating. I’d managed to find the one white, gay artist in New York whose life wasn’t being bankrolled by parents. And my fucking storyline went out the window like that. I wasn’t going to become the most famous person in New York by being the Olivia Pope to his Fitzgerald Grant. We were just a couple of broke, starving artists. Except he had a gallery showing, and I spent my evenings getting stoned, rereading critiques from my classmates during the one semester I attended the Art Institute of Chicago. One referred to my work as an attempt to bring back the abstract painting trend disdainfully referred to as zombie formalism by Times critic Roberta Smith in 2014. At least we were in love. I think. A gay couple fucking monogamously for three years must be love.

An attractive man, dressed oddly in a turtleneck for a hot summer night and wide-rimmed glasses, looking a bit like Michael B. Jordan if he read books, approaches me as I stand in front of my boyfriend’s artwork. “People actually like this Pollock knock-off, shit?” He asks. I like the painting, but I don’t mind the ego boost of someone trashing my boyfriend’s work. I ask this Black Jerry Saltz who his favorite artists are, if not the one on display before us. He responds with Salmon Toor (so I knew he was a faggot), Philemona Williamson, Amy Sherald, and, surprisingly, Edward Hopper, which feels kind of MAGA. He asks for mine, and I say, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Lichtenstein (a white king), and sorry if it makes me basic, but Basquiat. He jokes that he’s going to have to swipe left on me now, because he hates Basquiat. I find that being Black and hating Basquiat is contrarian to the point of attention-seeking, but I press him further. He claims Basquiat is overrated, and he’d be nothing more than an influencer if he were around now, selling art in partnership with Doritos or some shit. That people only like his art because he was Warhol’s pet project. I respond curtly that they were actually friends, which he ignores to continue his diatribe that while Warhol was vapid, he at least had a real POV that Basquiat did not possess, and that his art was mostly simplistic, primitive, scribblings. He insists Basquiat did not engage with pop culture or Black culture in any real, meaningful way, and we should be more interested in real Black artists like Faith Ringgold and Mavis Pusey, who got overshadowed by Warhol elevating his black bestie for clout so people would no longer see the Warhol Factory as barely a bunch of bored, uninteresting white people doing drugs and trying to be famous. I’m quickly bored with his ranting, but I can tell he wants to fuck me, and everyone else at the gallery is paying attention to my boyfriend and not me, so why let this attention go to waste?

I tell him he’s wrong, and he challenges me to offer any instance of Basquiat caring about moving the needle on Black art, so I mention the ’82 Slave Auction and the ’86 Jim Crow paintings. He rolls his eyes and sardonically says, “A black stick figure with the word Jim Crow written above it. Incredibly deep. Subtle too.” I say art isn’t supposed to be subtle. He says it should say SOMETHING. I tell him that there’s no such thing as moral or immoral art, it’s either bad or it’s good, and he scoffs at me, quoting “a dead white man,” which is a rather rude way to describe Oscar Wilde, but I guess it is accurate. I tell him he doesn’t need to conjure a thesis on Basquiat being bad for Black art when all he needs to do is say that he doesn’t like his work. Not everything is a crisis of virtue. He begrudgingly agrees, then says, fine, I don’t like his work. And then he asks me out.

My boyfriend appears at that moment, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck. He asks if we could get a photo together in front of his painting after he takes a quick photo with the gay actor from Euphoria. He rushes off as quickly as he appeared. And so, I am left alone with the man who just asked me out after an extended foreplay of art criticism. But now he knows I have a boyfriend. I reflexively begin to apologize, but he cuts me off. He is incensed, but not for the reason I presume. He scoffs, “You’re dating Fallon?” I ask how he knows my boyfriend. The man responds that he and Fallon went to Parsons together, where Fallon pumped out one shitty painting after another and was still the first in their graduating class to land a gallery showing, because his mother owns this gallery.

“You must have the wrong person. My boyfriend went to Parsons on scholarship.”

“Fallon’s dad is the Executive Dean. He wasn’t there on scholarship. And his mom owns this gallery,” he says. He can see the shock on my face. “He lied to you, huh? Don’t worry, he’s been cosplaying as a poor struggling artist for years for the street cred.”

I should be pissed off that I’ve been lied to. But instead, I’m smirking. I don’t have a broke white boyfriend. I have a rich white boyfriend. And a picture to pose for.