[ the nieuwe teylers museum is, in joe's opinion, something of a monstrosity, but that is also why he set foot in it the first time so it does a good job of capturing attention amongst the towering skyscrapers of the city and the other galleries within the arts district. while the second floor is dedicated to physical copies of art that has survived the hedge fund buyouts that found most museum quality masterpieces in private hands, the first floor is filled entirely with vr renditions of those same squirreled away pieces.
and also filled with the sound of joe's voice. ] — historical context is essential to understanding how these pieces came to life on the canvas and in turn how art can alter history.
[ he's gesticulating, arms spreading wide as if to encompass all of art and all of history at once, and his audience is rapt. maybe they hadn't expected a history lesson while perusing vr replicas of lost art or maybe they weren't expecting a man who talks about the masters like he was there, like they were friends, like he personally knew la scapigliata. ]
Art is not good because someone says it is, art is good because it touches you, it is subjective. Some fine art is revered as a masterpiece but really it is shrouded in mystery which makes it famous and the fame makes it a masterpiece, not the art itself.
[ the mona lisa is shit and more hot takes with joe jones. ]
[ When Booker wanders into the museum that afternoon, he forgets, for a moment, that Joe works here now. He'd done his best to keep to himself or keep out of the way, but it's not always an easy thing to do when you live in the same space and you're making efforts to be a better ... everything, which includes not shutting yourself out.
Between spending his time exploring the city — sometimes on his own, sometimes with Andy or Nile — or otherwise exploring the bottom of a glass at Red Wings, it's been a long few weeks. And he still doesn't have a job, so he has truly been encompassing the life of a flâneur.
He can hear Joe's voice in the next room, the expressive, passionate way he describes the art; and Booker tries to imagine it for himself, missing the way he'd used that voice with him the few times he tried (and failed) to teach Booker a little something about painting. He had a natural affinity for colour and style, could duplicate anything down to its finest line and its deepest shade to produce the perfect counterfeit — but whatever Joe is describing in art, the soul of it, Booker could never quite grasp.
He keeps his distance, trailing the periphery of Joe's group and taking in the paintings in all their virtual glory as he wanders. Only when Joe pauses, letting the others look off on their own does Booker approach slowly, like one might approach a sleeping lion. ]
[ joe likes this job. he would be doing this every time he visited a gallery anyway so he might as well get paid for it, keep his family fed while doing something he enjoys.
and now no one can question his solo budgeting.
his eyes move to booker immediately, easily recognizing the familiar voice after so long. it is seared into him, familiar in a way few are – sometimes he would think about how booker's voice was primed to become more familiar than quỳnh's as more time slipped away with her lost to them. had they lived out these last few hundred years instead of skipping them, it may well have turned out that way. ]
What is your question, Sébastien?
[ ah.
the first name. the way a teacher would address an exasperating child. better than anger perhaps. ]
[ Booker could excuse himself, turn back, turn away, head out, leave Joe to his work. But he stays because he has to stay, at least for now, even if Joe uses his name like a needle — not meant to cut, exactly ... just prick.
He gestures to an astonishingly accurate virtual depiction of Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana. ]
What of someone who struggles to see art in the way you describe it? What advice would you give to find something that touches them?
[ how is anyone not touched by a pretentious venetian man painting not just himself into a biblical scene – in front of jesus, no less, the utter audacity of this man – but puppies.
joe waffles on how to answer, biting his tongue against words that will cause a scene in his place of work. a muscle jumps in his jaw as he briefly grinds his teeth. he can be professional in a place of business and he told andy he wouldn't hit booker again, as least so long as booker didn't hit first. ]
This painting is about the transitory pleasure of mortality. Not all art needs to speak to everyone. [ maybe this painting does little for booker because it is a study of something he can no longer touch. joe could talk about the symbolism and composition of the wedding feast for ages, and he has on more than one occasion at the louvre, loudly explaining to nicky (and eavesdropping patrons) how the painting was looted by napoleon and brought to paris and then blocked from its return to venice because it was "too fragile" and the louvre was too greedy, but they'll have to come back to it. ] This way.
[ he moves through the digital displays, eyes catching a seascape that makes him long for the mediterranean air, a postmodernism piece full of block letters and anti-capitalist sentiment, a series of lithographs between surrealist paintings that make time feel liquid. joe feels everything, but he is not looking to find something to move him, but something to move booker. he turns a corner, decisive, and stops.
nestled under a staircase is a mixed media piece — a statue replica of klimt's lady in gold, mosaic tile and gold leaf and skeins of golden thread imitating the blocks and swirls of the iconic painting, seemingly lit from within with a soft golden glow. joe was taken by the piece immediately. ]
Art is about sharing. In order to feel anything, you have to be open to it. [ he gestures at the golden statue, somehow glittering and austere at once, bright and shiny and deeply sad. ]
Booker follows Joe around the space, keeping a polite distance but maintaining his pace, taking in the pieces around them as they pass by. Nearly all of the artworks have been painstakingly replicated into a consumable digital form, but there's still a strange emptiness to it all. Maybe it's because of his own love of tactile objects, and his limited ability to understand 'art' through physical repilcation, but the real lack of an artist's handiwork renders these pieces ... without soul. They're like prints one buys at the gift shop. Things he can copy for a price.
And maybe that's the thing; he isn't sure. For years he'd worked as a forger, had a real knack for it; many things had been copied by his hand and he would argue that he hadn't exactly put any kind of artistry into it even though there had been plenty of effort and sweat.
So when they come to a statue and Joe pauses before it, asks him a question — how do you feel? — Booker doesn't really know how to respond other than: 'well, it's covered in gold', which makes him hopeless at this. But he wants to try. He wants to see the way Joe sees, to understand. He tries to look past the object itself, tries to find meaning in the image. Context, Joe had said. ]
It's — suffocating. Covered in all that opulence. [ The mosaic tile, the patterning of the woman's dress, most of her body obscured by gold leaf. ] But freeing somehow, too. Like one could disappear into it.
[ Is there a right or wrong answer? He isn't sure. ]
[ the original painting had been called that before and joe thinks there is some merit to it, adele was more gold leaf than woman if you weren't looking at her. the statue has the same overwhelming splendor.
he waffles on continuing, jaw working for a moment. it is instinct to share, but the instinct stalls out with booker and especially when it comes to sharing anything that might involve nicky. it feels too dangerous now and that hurts.
Answering in a way that Joe might approve feels like a small, stupid way of proving that maybe there's some hope for him still. Some worth. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it feels childish even, but he still has to try, doesn't he?
Not that Booker will say as much aloud, but between the choice of avoiding Joe completely and making an effort to prove himself in the smallest, most seemingly insignificant ways, it was always going to be easier, of course, not to engage at all. Remain separate, serve out the rest of his exile somewhere in the city. Joe would not have to see the face of the brother who betrayed them and Booker could continue to punish himself on his own time. Not that the end of his exile was ever a guarantee that he would be accepted into the family again. He knows that, too.
But in this new world, without their immortality and no one else but each other, it feels too much like giving up and Booker knows that lesson too well now.
He gives the statue another look, but he still doesn't know how to feel about it. ]
It might just be that understanding fine art is above me.
[ joe would happily give the middle finger to the art world if he could. he has on occasion — michelangelo can suck his dick and if anyone thinks there aren't scathing reviews from anonymous letter writers critiquing the installation of a number of looted artworks they are wrong. the idea of art being inaccessible drives him up the wall but that isn't what they are talking about. he pushes down that rant for another day. ]
It reminds me of Quỳnh. Beautiful, so beautiful it overwhelms, distracting. [ he exhales slowly and his mouth quirks in what could only pass for a smile if you spent centuries with nicky and andy. ] You almost miss there is a woman, her strategy. But when you do see her, when you look for her, there is a softness in her eyes. And then she is lost again, weighed down by all this metal.
[ Booker's only real 'memories' of Quynh were of her drowning endlessly for hundreds of years, and so he looks at the statue of the gold woman and he can't quite see what Joe sees — though, perhaps, he can understand being weighed down by all of that metal; he sees that most nights too.
Or did. Since he woke up in this strange city, he hasn't had the same recurring nightmare, which has made sleeping less something to dread even if old habits die hard and he sleeps as little as is possible without keeling over.
But what he sees in Quynh has never been softness. Beauty, maybe, and even then it's hard to tell with bands of rusted iron obscuring her face, sharp and confining. But softness? Anger, yes. Frustration. Fear. Madness. And — suffocation.
He nods anyway and decides to go for honesty, even if it might make him sound stupid. It's not a test, right? ]
I see some of that. And some of it I don't. [ Can't. ]
[ he doesn't expect booker to see any softness in joe's lost sister, booker never knew quỳnh. it isn't said harshly or with recrimination, merely a fact. ]
Once she found a macaque that would steal all of Nicky's coin and attempt to make off with his sword. She named him Piccolo Nicolò, had a hat fitted for him that matched Nicky's.
[ despite the doubt and wariness that seems determinedly settled between them like a wall of joe's own making, the story comes with familiar ease and an even more familiar pinched finger gesture. tiny tiny. so small. ]
[ All Booker can do is imagine the Quynh that Joe speaks of, like he's placing the woman he's only mildly familiar with, someone he associates with madness and eternal drowning, into the bright shape of someone that doesn't quite fit and hoping it'll work anyway.
It doesn't, of course, but he likes the story.
His mouth quirks in amusement, even, up until the moment he feels guilty for doing so — like smiling is simply something he doesn't have a right to do in front of Joe, and it isn't, and his expression sobers again. ]
She loved you both.
[ Loved Andy too, no doubt. And maybe he can't see it in the dreams he has of her, but he can hear it in the fond way Joe speaks of her.
Of course, love has always been something of a slow poison for Booker, but he remembers when it had been good too. ]
She loved us all, the way Andy does. [ a soft snort of a laugh. ] Like a knife.
[ she and andy loved each other... differently... but that is neither here nor there and definitely not joe's story to tell. ]
We were a family. When we lost her it was like losing a limb. [ complete with the phantom pain of knowing that she was out there and they simply couldn't reach her. and then there was the loss, when they had finally — not given up, not really, but at some point searching had become untenable. it wasn't until booker that they knew for sure that she was still alive.
that was a different kind of grief. ]
We were broken when we found you. Maybe that is why... we couldn't see you were drowning, too.
[ the betrayal was booker's doing, but part of joe's grief and rage stems from feeling like they were all to blame, that they hadn't done enough, that they weren't enough. the guilt and terror eats at him, devolving into an anger that pools in his belly like acid, but it's born of loss and grief. ]
[ He isn't sure what to say that might mean anything.
Booker had been struggling to keep afloat within his own ocean of grief for so long, it made him willfully blind to seeing that the others had been suffering too. All of that outward love and the happiness was something he simply refused to accept out of spite, and Nicky and Joe having one another felt like a carrot dangled before the horse. Something he could never have again. He couldn't see it any other way, so it was easy enough to miss that they had been struggling with their own losses too.
And Andy — well, he'd seen her grieving, saw it in the way she would drink with him, would indulge in the bitterness and resentment he had for much of the world and for life, and he welcomed it instead because it was what he felt too; Misery loves company and all that.
All that time, and only now in their pain could he see the truth — like pain speaking to pain. It was familiar. It was almost a kind of sick comfort for himself. But how horrible that their suffering was the only way he could gain clarity. Not like this, Book.
Merde.
He swallows the thickness in his throat, buying himself a little time to say something. Finally, a quiet: ] Perhaps there is another artwork I might look at.
[ part of joe is almost glad booker doesn't say anything. it's so easy for joe to swing to anger, it's so easy for joe to be pissed at him, if booker did something like apologize again, joe would lose his shit. he doesn't want any more apologies because they're never for the right thing.
he moves without speaking, drawing them up the stairs to where the physical works are. there is more mixed media, some half digital, half physical, and some paintings on canvas or wood or glass. all of it is past their own time, though some are — to this world — hundreds of years old and meticulously preserved. if joe thought he could handle seeing booker for eight hours a day, he would suggest a job in art preservation. booker's eye for detail and meticulous forgeries would lend well to restoration and preservation — he couldn't do worse than the ecce homo.
joe loves that fucking jesus so much.
he stops in front of a canvas, pure white with a dash of red across it like the artist had meant to paint a dot and sneezed and their arm had jerked across the canvas. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
action —
and also filled with the sound of joe's voice. ] — historical context is essential to understanding how these pieces came to life on the canvas and in turn how art can alter history.
[ he's gesticulating, arms spreading wide as if to encompass all of art and all of history at once, and his audience is rapt. maybe they hadn't expected a history lesson while perusing vr replicas of lost art or maybe they weren't expecting a man who talks about the masters like he was there, like they were friends, like he personally knew la scapigliata. ]
Art is not good because someone says it is, art is good because it touches you, it is subjective. Some fine art is revered as a masterpiece but really it is shrouded in mystery which makes it famous and the fame makes it a masterpiece, not the art itself.
[ the mona lisa is shit and more hot takes with joe jones. ]
no subject
Between spending his time exploring the city — sometimes on his own, sometimes with Andy or Nile — or otherwise exploring the bottom of a glass at Red Wings, it's been a long few weeks. And he still doesn't have a job, so he has truly been encompassing the life of a flâneur.
He can hear Joe's voice in the next room, the expressive, passionate way he describes the art; and Booker tries to imagine it for himself, missing the way he'd used that voice with him the few times he tried (and failed) to teach Booker a little something about painting. He had a natural affinity for colour and style, could duplicate anything down to its finest line and its deepest shade to produce the perfect counterfeit — but whatever Joe is describing in art, the soul of it, Booker could never quite grasp.
He keeps his distance, trailing the periphery of Joe's group and taking in the paintings in all their virtual glory as he wanders. Only when Joe pauses, letting the others look off on their own does Booker approach slowly, like one might approach a sleeping lion. ]
I have a question.
no subject
and now no one can question his solo budgeting.
his eyes move to booker immediately, easily recognizing the familiar voice after so long. it is seared into him, familiar in a way few are – sometimes he would think about how booker's voice was primed to become more familiar than quỳnh's as more time slipped away with her lost to them. had they lived out these last few hundred years instead of skipping them, it may well have turned out that way. ]
What is your question, Sébastien?
[ ah.
the first name. the way a teacher would address an exasperating child. better than anger perhaps. ]
no subject
He gestures to an astonishingly accurate virtual depiction of Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana. ]
What of someone who struggles to see art in the way you describe it? What advice would you give to find something that touches them?
no subject
joe waffles on how to answer, biting his tongue against words that will cause a scene in his place of work. a muscle jumps in his jaw as he briefly grinds his teeth. he can be professional in a place of business and he told andy he wouldn't hit booker again, as least so long as booker didn't hit first. ]
This painting is about the transitory pleasure of mortality. Not all art needs to speak to everyone. [ maybe this painting does little for booker because it is a study of something he can no longer touch. joe could talk about the symbolism and composition of the wedding feast for ages, and he has on more than one occasion at the louvre, loudly explaining to nicky (and eavesdropping patrons) how the painting was looted by napoleon and brought to paris and then blocked from its return to venice because it was "too fragile" and the louvre was too greedy, but they'll have to come back to it. ] This way.
[ he moves through the digital displays, eyes catching a seascape that makes him long for the mediterranean air, a postmodernism piece full of block letters and anti-capitalist sentiment, a series of lithographs between surrealist paintings that make time feel liquid. joe feels everything, but he is not looking to find something to move him, but something to move booker. he turns a corner, decisive, and stops.
nestled under a staircase is a mixed media piece — a statue replica of klimt's lady in gold, mosaic tile and gold leaf and skeins of golden thread imitating the blocks and swirls of the iconic painting, seemingly lit from within with a soft golden glow. joe was taken by the piece immediately. ]
Art is about sharing. In order to feel anything, you have to be open to it. [ he gestures at the golden statue, somehow glittering and austere at once, bright and shiny and deeply sad. ]
What do you feel?
no subject
Booker follows Joe around the space, keeping a polite distance but maintaining his pace, taking in the pieces around them as they pass by. Nearly all of the artworks have been painstakingly replicated into a consumable digital form, but there's still a strange emptiness to it all. Maybe it's because of his own love of tactile objects, and his limited ability to understand 'art' through physical repilcation, but the real lack of an artist's handiwork renders these pieces ... without soul. They're like prints one buys at the gift shop. Things he can copy for a price.
And maybe that's the thing; he isn't sure. For years he'd worked as a forger, had a real knack for it; many things had been copied by his hand and he would argue that he hadn't exactly put any kind of artistry into it even though there had been plenty of effort and sweat.
So when they come to a statue and Joe pauses before it, asks him a question — how do you feel? — Booker doesn't really know how to respond other than: 'well, it's covered in gold', which makes him hopeless at this. But he wants to try. He wants to see the way Joe sees, to understand. He tries to look past the object itself, tries to find meaning in the image. Context, Joe had said. ]
It's — suffocating. Covered in all that opulence. [ The mosaic tile, the patterning of the woman's dress, most of her body obscured by gold leaf. ] But freeing somehow, too. Like one could disappear into it.
[ Is there a right or wrong answer? He isn't sure. ]
no subject
[ the original painting had been called that before and joe thinks there is some merit to it, adele was more gold leaf than woman if you weren't looking at her. the statue has the same overwhelming splendor.
he waffles on continuing, jaw working for a moment. it is instinct to share, but the instinct stalls out with booker and especially when it comes to sharing anything that might involve nicky. it feels too dangerous now and that hurts.
eventually, a sigh. he is so tired. ]
It's not a test, Book.
no subject
Answering in a way that Joe might approve feels like a small, stupid way of proving that maybe there's some hope for him still. Some worth. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it feels childish even, but he still has to try, doesn't he?
Not that Booker will say as much aloud, but between the choice of avoiding Joe completely and making an effort to prove himself in the smallest, most seemingly insignificant ways, it was always going to be easier, of course, not to engage at all. Remain separate, serve out the rest of his exile somewhere in the city. Joe would not have to see the face of the brother who betrayed them and Booker could continue to punish himself on his own time. Not that the end of his exile was ever a guarantee that he would be accepted into the family again. He knows that, too.
But in this new world, without their immortality and no one else but each other, it feels too much like giving up and Booker knows that lesson too well now.
He gives the statue another look, but he still doesn't know how to feel about it. ]
It might just be that understanding fine art is above me.
no subject
[ joe would happily give the middle finger to the art world if he could. he has on occasion — michelangelo can suck his dick and if anyone thinks there aren't scathing reviews from anonymous letter writers critiquing the installation of a number of looted artworks they are wrong. the idea of art being inaccessible drives him up the wall but that isn't what they are talking about. he pushes down that rant for another day. ]
It reminds me of Quỳnh. Beautiful, so beautiful it overwhelms, distracting. [ he exhales slowly and his mouth quirks in what could only pass for a smile if you spent centuries with nicky and andy. ] You almost miss there is a woman, her strategy. But when you do see her, when you look for her, there is a softness in her eyes. And then she is lost again, weighed down by all this metal.
[ suffocating was appropriate. ]
no subject
Or did. Since he woke up in this strange city, he hasn't had the same recurring nightmare, which has made sleeping less something to dread even if old habits die hard and he sleeps as little as is possible without keeling over.
But what he sees in Quynh has never been softness. Beauty, maybe, and even then it's hard to tell with bands of rusted iron obscuring her face, sharp and confining. But softness? Anger, yes. Frustration. Fear. Madness. And — suffocation.
He nods anyway and decides to go for honesty, even if it might make him sound stupid. It's not a test, right? ]
I see some of that. And some of it I don't. [ Can't. ]
no subject
[ he doesn't expect booker to see any softness in joe's lost sister, booker never knew quỳnh. it isn't said harshly or with recrimination, merely a fact. ]
Once she found a macaque that would steal all of Nicky's coin and attempt to make off with his sword. She named him Piccolo Nicolò, had a hat fitted for him that matched Nicky's.
[ despite the doubt and wariness that seems determinedly settled between them like a wall of joe's own making, the story comes with familiar ease and an even more familiar pinched finger gesture. tiny tiny. so small. ]
no subject
It doesn't, of course, but he likes the story.
His mouth quirks in amusement, even, up until the moment he feels guilty for doing so — like smiling is simply something he doesn't have a right to do in front of Joe, and it isn't, and his expression sobers again. ]
She loved you both.
[ Loved Andy too, no doubt. And maybe he can't see it in the dreams he has of her, but he can hear it in the fond way Joe speaks of her.
Of course, love has always been something of a slow poison for Booker, but he remembers when it had been good too. ]
no subject
[ she and andy loved each other... differently... but that is neither here nor there and definitely not joe's story to tell. ]
We were a family. When we lost her it was like losing a limb. [ complete with the phantom pain of knowing that she was out there and they simply couldn't reach her. and then there was the loss, when they had finally — not given up, not really, but at some point searching had become untenable. it wasn't until booker that they knew for sure that she was still alive.
that was a different kind of grief. ]
We were broken when we found you. Maybe that is why... we couldn't see you were drowning, too.
[ the betrayal was booker's doing, but part of joe's grief and rage stems from feeling like they were all to blame, that they hadn't done enough, that they weren't enough. the guilt and terror eats at him, devolving into an anger that pools in his belly like acid, but it's born of loss and grief. ]
no subject
Booker had been struggling to keep afloat within his own ocean of grief for so long, it made him willfully blind to seeing that the others had been suffering too. All of that outward love and the happiness was something he simply refused to accept out of spite, and Nicky and Joe having one another felt like a carrot dangled before the horse. Something he could never have again. He couldn't see it any other way, so it was easy enough to miss that they had been struggling with their own losses too.
And Andy — well, he'd seen her grieving, saw it in the way she would drink with him, would indulge in the bitterness and resentment he had for much of the world and for life, and he welcomed it instead because it was what he felt too; Misery loves company and all that.
All that time, and only now in their pain could he see the truth — like pain speaking to pain. It was familiar. It was almost a kind of sick comfort for himself. But how horrible that their suffering was the only way he could gain clarity. Not like this, Book.
Merde.
He swallows the thickness in his throat, buying himself a little time to say something. Finally, a quiet: ] Perhaps there is another artwork I might look at.
no subject
he moves without speaking, drawing them up the stairs to where the physical works are. there is more mixed media, some half digital, half physical, and some paintings on canvas or wood or glass. all of it is past their own time, though some are — to this world — hundreds of years old and meticulously preserved. if joe thought he could handle seeing booker for eight hours a day, he would suggest a job in art preservation. booker's eye for detail and meticulous forgeries would lend well to restoration and preservation — he couldn't do worse than the ecce homo.
joe loves that fucking jesus so much.
he stops in front of a canvas, pure white with a dash of red across it like the artist had meant to paint a dot and sneezed and their arm had jerked across the canvas. ]
Thoughts?