Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

another and also with one who kept himself behind spectacles but who had
not his hat on and whom I took for the cashier of the “establishment,” for
want of stumbling in on the dealer-—as customary, stepping upon the con-
science of his free guests.
“There is some Monet in that, is it?” I ventured towards the eye-
glasses which I regarded as the luxfer prisms over a dark back-store. “Money?”
echoed back the prisms with that kindness that betrays amused contempt.
“Well, I have not seen this show advertised, so as to be prepared” I
parried now.
“Advertised!” the smiling eye-glasses thrust forth.
“Are things for sale?” I lanced again.
“Why?” he sparred.
“Well damn it,”—I pushed forward—“it is art, I believe”—
“I don’t know, what do you call art?” was his upper cut.
“Oh go on, I am here looking for your standard, not mine,” I wrestled.
“But I haven’t any,” broke forth the spectacles.
“Do you mean it?” I gasped with slight suspicion of the usual game.
And he: “Why certainly, I look for truth in art, and all I need for an acid
test, is sincerity.”
“Well then you are a missionary on blackest Fifth Avenue, a pioneer
battling with the white Indians of obsolete New York,” I gave way.
“I am nobody,” he finished me.
As something is next to nothing, somebody is he who can conceive that
he is next to nobody. On that day it dawned upon me that there was still
hope.
Oscar Bluemner

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