Baking soda and distilled white vinegar are two of the most used cleaners in my home. I often say that there’s not much you can’t clean if you have baking soda, vinegar, and dish soap on hand.

I reach for baking soda to scour baked-on grease from my stainless steel skillet and aluminum baking sheets. I mix a bit of distilled white vinegar and water in a spray bottle to make an effective glass cleaner, and with a drop of dish soap, it’s my go-to solution for deodorizing dog accidents on carpet.

But it drives me absolutely mad when I see people on social media combining baking soda and vinegar to make a cleaning solution.

Angelico Schwartzkopf
and Jean-Paul Pudzianowski
Fine Art Authenticators

I. Introduction

As requested, herein is our authentication report on the artwork with catalogue number 45/47.

II. Alleged Artist’s Statement

Nearly all authentication disputes involve works allegedly created by long-dead artistic masters. In this case, however, the alleged artist is still alive and denounces the work in question as a forgery. However, many mature artists (and the alleged artist is very old, regardless of maturity level) renounce or even destroy artworks from their younger days to protect their reputations from association with earlier, less polished work. Thus, it is possible that the alleged artist is trying to disassociate himself from this work out of concern for his reputation.

What can be safely said is that whether the work is the creation of the alleged artist or a forgery, the creator wishes to remain anonymous. Thus, this report will scrupulously guard against revealing the identity of the alleged artist.

III. Occasion for the Artwork

Although the alleged artist disputes this, the artwork appears to have been created in 2003 to commemorate the fiftieth birthday of a close (and extremely wealthy) friend of the alleged artist. Works commissioned by (or for) the extremely wealthy have, of course, a long and (generally) honorable tradition in art history.

IV. Description of the Artwork

The artwork in question portrays a female nude, with dialogue superimposed onto her body. Only the upper torso is portrayed, with no head, arms, legs, hands, or feet. The canvas is an 8-by-11-inch piece of paper. The medium for the written dialogue is typewriter; the medium for the torso appears to be Sharpie.

V. Analysis of the Artwork

To the plebeian, the artwork might seem like a rudimentary, even crude, drawing. But more discerning critics will appreciate the efficacious application of minimalism. And of course, the portrayal of the subject as mere torso, sans arms, legs, and even face, allows the artwork to make a powerful statement about the objectification of women. Some have argued that the aforementioned statement is “The objectification of women is fantastic, and when you’re a star they let you do it.” Thematic interpretation, however, is not within the purview of this document.

The words on the torso also testify to the artwork’s sophistication. They are a modern-day Platonic dialogue: a conversation between two specific characters about the meaning of life. The two characters appear to find that meaning in activities that might not be entirely Platonic, but again, such interpretations are beyond this document’s scope. The dialogue also hints of Gnosticism in its celebration of an in-group (“we have certain things in common”) that hoards insider knowledge (“I won’t tell you what it is… may every day be another wonderful secret”).

VI. Analysis of the Signature

Among those claiming that the artwork is a forgery, a central argument has been that the signature does not resemble the alleged artist’s actual signature. To buttress this argument, its proponents have produced recent signatures by the alleged artist, signatures that indeed do not resemble the one on the painting. However, the signature on the artwork does, in fact, closely resemble multiple signatures by the alleged artist on documents from around the time of the artwork’s creation. Thus, the signature is not indicative of forgery, any more than Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a forgery because it does not resemble paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period.

One might argue that matters involving a signature should be the province of experts in handwriting, not those in fine art authentication. We beg to differ. While the signature is always at least a tangential part of an artwork’s mise-en-scène, in this case, it is crucial. The signature’s placement and shaping are such that the signature functions as the nude female’s pubic hair. Thus, this signature is the method by which the artist (rather like Velázquez in Las Meninas) has slyly inserted himself into the artwork—in this case, slyly inserting himself into a nude female.

This playful insertion is further evidence that while the artwork may lack detail, it does not lack artistic sophistication. What seems to be pubic hair is, on closer inspection, a signature, and vice versa. The duality evokes that great artistic tradition of visual puns, trompe l’oeil.

VII. Purpose of the Artwork

Just as Jan van Eyck’s great painting The Arnolfini Portrait is widely believed to have served as a marriage contract, so the artwork examined here may well have served to seal a union. The dialogue typed onto the female torso, discussed already, emphasizes the mutually beneficial bond between the creator and the recipient of the artwork. The artwork’s creator and recipient seem to share some sort of agreement, some sort of deal. Viewed in that light, the artwork becomes the art of the deal.

VIII. Conclusion

We unequivocally conclude that this work is not a forgery. The focus on an objectified female torso, the tone of the conversation inscribed on that torso, and the style of the signature are all emblematic of the alleged artist and the nature of his friendship with the artwork’s recipient. Especially characteristic of the alleged artist, as he himself has stated while being unwittingly recorded, is his use of his identity, in this case via his signature, to penetrate the female form without asking permission. So while we have respected the alleged artist’s concerns by being careful not to reveal his identity, we conclude that he is the actual artist, regardless of whatever denials he might trump up.

“I’ve always made it a policy to never question good fortune.”

Food items mentioned by Lyle Lovett:

• Summer strawberries from the Pacific Northwest
• Eggs, bacon, and pancakes from IHOP
• Two-thirds-of-a-pound burgers, served with chips and a jar of pickled jalapeños

Lyle Lovett has been a mainstay of the American music scene since he was playing the bars and burger joints around College Station, Texas, in the 1980s. He learned to sing in his Lutheran school choir and started playing guitar while his age was still in the single digits. While Lovett always loved music, he didn’t start trying to make a go of it until he was attending college at Texas A&M and began playing around town. Eventually, the legendary Texas troubadour Guy Clark heard a demo tape of Lovett’s songs and helped him get a deal with MCA Records.

Perhaps due to his time on the range, he’s learned to be a patient man, a trait that spills over into his songwriting. He’s willing to wait for an album to fully coalesce before releasing it into the world. Guy Clark, who is a hero of Lovett’s, once told him that he won’t release an album until he gets ten songs he likes. “That always stuck with me,” Lovett explained. “And that’s sort of how I feel.” So, after a ten-year hiatus, Lovett eventually came up with enough songs he liked to return with an album. His twelfth studio album, 12th of June, was released, naturally, on the 13th of May 2022. Lovett kept himself busy during his time away, not only waiting for the muse to appear, but also getting married and becoming the father of twins, whose birth date is memorialized in the album title.

—Melissa Locker

I. DEAD SOLID PERFECT

LYLE LOVETT: Excuse me, but I’ll be right back. I have to get a coaster.

THE BELIEVER: Yes, please. I believe in protecting the furniture at all costs.

LL: I’m really protecting myself from those unsightly rings on the furniture that never go away.

BLVR: Glad we are starting this interview with some furniture safety tips. Feels right.

LL: I looked over the Jim Jarmusch interview you did, and it reminded me a little bit of the old Interview magazine interviews they would do. They had one personality interview another personality, and they were kind of all over the place—in a good way.

BLVR: Interview magazine is back, and they are doing those interviews again.

LL: Well, that’s great. I interviewed Josh Brolin once for that magazine, and, gosh, somebody interviewed me in 1994. I’d have to look that up. I think it was actually my friend Sam Robards. I knew Josh from kind of running into him in an elevator once in Austin, and he came to some of my shows and he put me up for the job.

BLVR: Do you often meet people in elevators?

LL: Yeah, you never know who you’re going to meet in an elevator. But there’s always that sort of awkward elevator etiquette of: Well, do I speak? Do I not speak? Do I just look at the numbers? Do I look up? Do I look down? All that? But I usually try to break through that and just say hi.

BLVR: Is that a good opening line for you?

LL: It usually starts something, yeah. I met Jack Black and his family once in an elevator. Well, waiting for an elevator. He was pushing a stroller, as I recall—this was years ago. Talking to him was delightful. It was sort of like doing a scene with him, in a way, because he was Jack Black, you know? And as we were talking, the door of the elevator I was waiting for opened, and we talked long enough that the door closed and the elevator went away, and he said, Oh, man, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you miss your ’vator. Just like that.

BLVR: Gotta love a ’vator reference! So what did you interview Josh Brolin about?

LL: It was a film that he had coming out. I think No Country for Old Men? Was he part of that?

BLVR: Josh Brolin was in No Country for Old Men, so you may have interviewed him about that film. Did you ever want to be a journalist?

LL: Well, I studied journalism in school. I have a degree in journalism from Texas A&M. But there was a point at which I stopped asking myself the question: What do I want to do? And I finally fell to asking myself: What can I do? My first couple of years, I took general studies courses, and I’d fallen in with a student organization through the Student Center that sponsored a coffeehouse. It was mainly a performance space for students, but we had enough of a budget to bring in professionals two or three times a year. I was a freshman when I got involved in this organization, the Basement Coffeehouse. It was built out of what had been the Student Center bicycle shop. They allowed us to build a stage and a balcony and some seats, and it held about a hundred people. We hosted student performances every Friday and Saturday night from eight to midnight, and each act did thirty-minute sets.

In the very first meeting I went to, they said, You’ll be in programming, and I said, Well, what’s that? And they handed me a sheet of paper with a list of names and phone numbers, and they said, You call people and ask them if they want to play. And so that’s what I started doing. As a result, I got to know all the students on campus who were interested in performing. It was what I was trying to do at home in my bedroom. I felt as though immediately I was a part of this community of performers on campus. Texas A&M was not known for its liberal arts in those days, and the only music—formal music education—that existed on campus was the marching band, the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, a three-hundred-piece military marching band, and a music appreciation course where you learned to pick out, you know, instruments in classical compositions, recordings, and such. So, being a part of the music community there on campus was appealing. It was also a small, specialized group of people who were not like most of the other students on campus, and I enjoyed that distinction. And I really enjoyed getting to know all the people around town, around campus, who wanted to play and sing. It inspired me to practice. It inspired me to try to write songs. I started playing out the next year—I was just obsessed with wanting to play and sing—and was able to book myself two or three or four nights a week somewhere in town for fifty dollars a night. In one case, I had a two-year gig at a hamburger joint on Sunday evenings that paid me in hamburgers instead of money.

BLVR: Do you still order hamburgers? Or are you completely, permanently sick of them?

LL: No, no, I love them. It was really great, because it was a wonderful hamburger place called Dead Solid Perfect, named after the golf book. The owner of the place had a very basic menu. Didn’t serve french fries, didn’t serve any ice cream or ice cream drinks. It was just bottled beverages, beer, and soda water. And they had a big jar of pickled jalapeños on the counter, and you got either a hamburger or a cheeseburger, served with potato chips. Two-thirds of a pound of meat in each burger. For a two-hour gig, from six to eight, with a break in the middle, on Sunday evenings, he paid me eight burgers a week. I could never eat that many, so I had a tab of burgers built up. I could take anybody to lunch, anytime I wanted, for those two years. It was a great gig, and of course, I didn’t ever imagine it would work into something that I could do for a living.

Read the rest of this interview over at The Believer.