Central Park Stall
There was a place I needed to invest in, but the problem was that I had no money.
Without any real capital, what was the fastest way to make a lot of money?
I thought about it for a long time, then muttered to myself, "Hmm. That sounds like the kind of idea that would make even my conscience ache."
If something like that really existed, everyone in the world would already be rich.
Even after regressing, the world wasn’t about to make things easy for me.
"Did I aim too high?"
If all I wanted was to make, say, around ten trillion won and spend the rest of my life loafing around, I wouldn’t have to push myself this hard. But my goal was bigger than that, so I’d gone a little too far.
"Well, it’ll work out somehow."
To clear my head, I decided to walk for a while.
Licensed stalls lined the park in every direction. Some sold food, while others offered jewelry or simple souvenirs.
As I wandered and looked around, I noticed a small commotion at one of the stalls in the distance. It was too far away to see his face clearly, but the man looked like a broad-shouldered white guy, and an old man with a snow-white beard was seated in front of the stand.
The man laughed loudly enough for me to hear from that far away. "Bwahaha! You’re asking sixty dollars for this? Seriously?"
The old man with the white beard replied, "What’s so impossible about that?"
The man lectured him as if he were on a stage. "The first rule of painting is line. But this piece? It’s the sort of thing some hack who can’t even draw a proper line hears about and then tries to imitate like a pro. He probably thought he looked relaxed and sophisticated while he was painting it, but in the end it’s nothing more than a doodle copied from a famous artist."
"So what exactly are you trying to say?"
"There are painters who look down on modern art, but this isn’t art—it’s child’s play. Maybe I’d expect this in some other city, but in New York, nobody’s going to be fooled into buying a third-rate picture like this. Even ten dollars is too much for something like this."
The old man snapped back, "If you don’t want to buy it, then don’t. No one’s forcing your hand."
"Selling the painting is one thing. But calling this kind of thing a work of art is an insult to real art. You should know that."
"I know, so stop wasting my time and go on your way."
The white man left without buying anything, and the old man grumbled as he straightened the pictures on the table.
For some reason, I found the whole thing interesting, so I headed over to the stall, watching the man’s retreating back.
Art for Sale at Affordable Prices. Don’t Miss This Opportunity!
"What’s going on here?"
At my question, the old man said in an irritated voice, "Beats me. He came over out of nowhere and went on and on about real art and how I couldn’t even draw a proper line. Said something about working for a famous gallery or whatever. If he wasn’t going to buy anything, he should’ve just kept his mouth shut. Tsk."
I tried to soothe him. "That must have been annoying. Anyone would get angry if someone talked about their work like that."
The old man’s expression eased a little as he shook his head. "Well, not really. I wasn’t the one who painted it."
"You’re not an artist?"
"Haha! I don’t even really know what these pictures are. I’m just the guy who sells them for a daily wage."
"I see."
The old man looked at me and asked, "You’re not from New York, are you? Where’d you come from?"
"I came from Korea."
"Oh! Korea! My cousin took part in the Korean War. He still talks about those days with pride whenever I see him. What’s your name?"
"Han Miru."
"I’m Jackie Bayless. Just call me Jack."
"Yes, sir."
I chatted with the old man for a bit.
"Then who painted these?"
The old man gave a snort of laughter. "Beats me. Even if I told you the name, you probably wouldn’t know it."
"Fair enough."
If I was already in New York, maybe I should buy one as a souvenir?
I took another look at the paintings on display. Even at a glance, I could see why that man had said what he did.
Some were prints or graffiti rather than oil paintings or watercolors. Others were quick croquis sketches or loose drawings.
At first glance, they almost looked carelessly drawn, and the sizes varied wildly from piece to piece.
Unlike classical art, where even a layman can usually tell whether something is well done or not, modern art isn’t easy to read unless you have a certain eye for it.
I pointed to a painting of a little girl reaching toward a red heart-shaped balloon and asked, "How much is this one?"
At my question, the old man said, "Sixty dollars a piece, no matter the size."
"Hmm..."
That was pricey. How many people would really buy an unknown artist’s painting from a street stall at that price?
"How many have you sold today?"
"Three in four hours."
Three pieces meant 180 dollars. Considering the cost of materials, wasn’t that pretty decent business?
I was about to leave when I hesitated.
Something about the style felt strangely familiar. I felt like I’d seen something similar before. Where had I seen this...?
Then, all at once, an episode surfaced in my memory.
Central Park stall.
The promotional slogan about selling art cheaply.
And this very painting!
Don’t tell me this is...?
"How many paintings do you have left in total?"
At the sudden question, the old man tilted his head. "Let’s see. Around a dozen or so left."
"I’ll take them all."
The old man stared at me in shock. "All of them?"
"Yes."
I immediately pulled out my wallet to check how many dollars I had left. Then I asked the old man, "Do you take cards?"
Ranksy.
He called himself an art terrorist. What he did was the sort of madcap artistic stunt that could fairly be called a form of chaos.
He had infiltrated places like the British Museum and the Louvre, left behind stone sculptures depicting cavemen pushing shopping carts, and vanished. Other times he would sneak through the night, paint graffiti on walls, and disappear before dawn.
And yet, for reasons no one could quite explain, the more hostility he showed toward the existing art world, the higher his fame climbed—and with that fame, the more expensive his work became.
He was hailed as the greatest artist of the twenty-first century, a street artist, a creative destroyer, a genius who had opened a new horizon for modern art, and more.
Critics and art-world insiders alike praised his artistry in unison.
The people who used to scrub away his graffiti and report him when he was a nobody now rushed to preserve it once he became famous; some even tore whole walls out and sold them.
The mobile home on which he had painted graffiti sold for five hundred times its original price, and his earlier works later went to auction for more than five hundred thousand dollars apiece.
Unhappy with that state of affairs, Ranksy consigned one of his own paintings to Sotheby’s himself, then shredded it the moment the winning bidder was announced.
Even then, the bidder bought it gladly. The act of destruction itself was treated as performance art, and the price only climbed higher because of it.
In the art world, fame was money.
No one looked at a painting as just a painting.
Whether it was the public or the experts, everyone paid based only on the artist’s reputation. And once they bought a piece, they didn’t hang it on a wall to enjoy it; they locked it away in storage and prayed the price would keep rising.
Ranksy wanted to expose that illusion. That was why he had planned a performance in which his paintings would be sold at a Central Park stall in New York.
Surely no one would think that a sixty-dollar painting sold at a street stall was an authentic Ranksy.
He had hired an old man he found through a job site to sell the paintings for him.
New York was not only the financial capital of the world, but also its cultural capital. New Yorkers were fiercely proud of that fact.
But how many of them can actually recognize the value of my work?
When I thought about it, it was pretty funny.
If a painting that sold for over five hundred thousand dollars at Christie's or Sotheby's was being sold for sixty bucks at a street stall, no one would give it a second glance.
In the end, public taste is nothing but an illusion. There’s no such thing as a person in this world who can truly recognize real art.
By the time the sun was setting, Ranksy made his way leisurely toward the park.
Did he sell one or two, maybe three?
The old man was still sitting there. But to my surprise, the display table was completely bare. Not a single one of the paintings he had prepared was left.
The old man looked at him and said, "You’re finally here. I’ve been waiting a while."
He asked, flustered, "Where are the paintings?"
"They all sold."
At that, Ranksy was stunned.
"You mean every single one?"
When he stared at him in disbelief, the old man said, "Three were bought by different people, and then a young Asian fellow came by and bought the rest all at once."
The paintings he had prepared numbered fifteen in all.
Some had taken only ten minutes to paint, while others had been worked on meticulously for an entire month. But not a single one of them lacked his artistic spirit.
And yet twelve paintings, after excluding the three already sold, had all been bought by one person?
At sixty dollars apiece, that meant the buyer had spent seven hundred twenty dollars in total. For an unknown artist’s work, that was an absurd amount of money.
"Who on earth was it?"
"A Korean tourist, he said. Seemed to like your paintings."
Ranksy couldn’t shake off the shock so easily.
He recognized the value of my work at a street stall? He understood the artistry of the paintings without knowing the artist’s fame or trusting a dealer’s reputation? There was really someone like that in the world?
The old man patted the frozen Ranksy on the shoulder and said, "Haha! Looks like you can hardly believe the paintings sold out. Well, sometimes luck comes around like this. Don’t give up on your dream and keep working hard. Right now they’re just sixty-dollar paintings sold at a stall, but one day you might become a famous artist and have them sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at a place like Sotheby’s, don’t you think?"
"..."
Back at my lodging, I set the paintings down and opened my laptop right away to look up Ranksy’s work.
I wasn’t sure whether it had anything to do with working at a game company, but Seonwu had always had a strong interest in design and art as well.
Because of that, whenever there was an exhibition, he would drag me all over the place, saying he didn’t want to go alone, and thanks to that I’d at least had some exposure to famous paintings.
Thinking of something he’d told me, I had bought them all first and asked questions later...
"Are these really Ranksy paintings?"
Ranksy was a contemporary artist whose real name and face were both unknown.
And yet there wasn’t a single person in the art world who didn’t know the name. His antics were frequently covered by the media, and he became famous even among ordinary people.
One of those antics had been selling his own paintings at a Central Park stall for sixty dollars each.
Ranksy was practically a superstar in the art world now.
And he still would be ten years from now.
But because he disliked authority and was known for work that criticized the commercialization of art, he almost never submitted his paintings directly to auction.
Demand was endless and supply was limited, so whenever one of his works did reach an auction block, it sold for an outrageous sum.
A painting that had gone up at Christie’s not long ago sold for as much as 1.5 million dollars.
"So how much is all this worth?"
I had bought twelve paintings.
If each one fetched five hundred thousand dollars, that would be six million dollars in total. I had turned seven hundred twenty dollars into six million dollars!
"How many times over is that in profit?"
Of course, that was only if they really were Ranksy paintings. If they were merely copies painted in his style, then I’d be lucky to get back even the price I paid.
While I was momentarily spinning a happy little fantasy, I realized one crucial fact.