“He exports the fruits into other nations. The customs paperwork is the artwork.”

“He must have a gig.”

“I think he’s at RISD.”

I stood there quietly, nodding occasionally. The conversation continued in the same vein for an hour, until we all sat down to eat, and then during dinner it got even worse. Every artwork they discussed was an idea, a piece of an idea, a joke, a commentary, a repositioning of a theoretical argument from twenty-five years ago, a reaction, an indictment, an impeachment of something else. It was like someone had taken the last two hundred years of culture, put it in a blender, pureed it into a sauce, and eaten it, only for this semiotic mash of ironic purposelessness to be then expelled back out again. I nodded along, laughing when I was supposed to laugh and shaking my head when I was supposed to be outraged, at the money someone had been paid for a joke that wasn’t that funny, or at how they hadn’t been hailed as geniuses, and we might as well have been discussing television, or politics, because all of it centered on our reactions, the infinite hall of mirrors echoing our responses to and over each other, to the arts that had become our entertainment.

Eventually, someone asked me a question. “…political purpose?”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Does your work have a political purpose,” Lena said slowly, deliberately, and Tom and Anele turned to listen. Jes raised one perfect eyebrow and waited for my inevitable stumble.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I replied.

“Well, in this day and age almost nobody is just making paintings,” she said, and then everybody turned to listen, and anxiety surged through me as I tried to think about how to respond. I’d never found a way to cleverly encapsulate what I was doing. I mean, I’d thought plenty about bullshit. Part of the beauty of abstraction is that in theory, you can bullshit your way out of anything. “It’s a meditation on discourse,” you could say about a big blue square. “It’s an indictment of a post-formalist universe whose lenses are viewed solely through a Rawlsian utility-dependence.” “It’s about Ana Mendieta falling out a window.” “It’s about the impermeability of dirt.” Really—you can say anything and get away with it, if you’re bold enough. And yet I was not a person of theory. I was a person of practice; my paintings were the exact things I meant for them to be. They were not bullshit. But I couldn’t defiantly tell her, Well, I am, because it could only sound angry and defensive. I settled on deflection. And first, I wanted to acknowledge the hostility of putting me on the spot like that.

“Hold on,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “Can a girl get a drink first?”