The Con Artist

He moved through the crowd unseen, blending in easily. An insignificant speck in an expanse of people. They didn’t see him as he watched them, they merely saw the tray of drinks which he carried - it was as if he himself was truly invisible. They tilted their heads, critiquing the work on the walls, turning their noses up at it or applauding it; seeing aspects of it which were not there in an attempt to seem more intelligent than they actually were.

A too tanned man in an expensive suit and a wife whose face seemed unnaturally tight for a woman of her age stood in front of a large canvas which was a mix of blue hues and splashes of vibrant pinks, which if you looked from a distance and squinted actually formed the image of erect male genitalia. They were surrounded by a crowd equally as unearthly looking as themselves who nodded and frowned - or attempted to with their poison filled faces - in concentration.

“The artist is conveying such beauty and pain in this piece, you get a true sense of his loneliness and despair but also hope, don’t you agree, dearest?”

The woman with the too tight face nodded in her husband’s direction.

“You discovered the artist, didn’t you, Felicia?” an eager woman asked from the gathering.

Felicia Too-Tight-Face smiled as best she could. “Yes. He was starving on the streets trying to peddle his canvases to tourists but I saw within him a wonderful gift, the true eye of an artist. I knew at once that he deserved to have himself be seen. Of course he is painfully shy and suffers from deep dark depressions. He would hate us all gawking at this work like this…”

What a wonderful patron of the arts Felicia Too-Tight-Face was, he thought as he watched them all hanging on her every word. What a shame that she knew nothing about art at all. What a shame neither did he, apart from how much these philistines were willing to pay for it. Strange then that the crowd here this evening was lapping it all up, not realising as they did so that the waiter who served them their drinks was the very same person who had created these colourful canvases splattered with random colours which represented merely what he could lay his hands on at the time. And the man who Felicia Too-Tight-Face was describing to them was his greatest work of all - a poor, homeless, depressive with the soul of an artist. Well, not quite. He lived in a penthouse, which he happened to know cost twice as much as Felicia Too-Tight-Face’s apartment, and the only depression he ever suffered was when someone tried to serve him warm champagne - although he had no scruples about serving that this evening to these plebeians.

Art was a con and so was he.