BEAUTY BE DAMNED (Frenchtown)

210. BEAUTY BE DAMNED (Frenchtown):

"You can't criticize that stuff man you don't know what you're doing they'll get you in the end for this you know" Busbee said that to me out behind the catering hall and we'd just been inside the decoy shop - this huge place selling one after the other of duck decoys and wild animal figurines and stuff and the walls too were lined with beautifully framed trophy fish and trout and paintings and landscapes and that sort of thing GRANTED beautiful enough but questionable too as art I would have thought MAYBE decorative craft or something but not ART - missing all the qualifications in my mind for art - and the proprietor was a smallishly rotund guy about 60 years old and the entire time he was on the telephone arranging sale after sale of these things "auction prices as bid I understand that but these things are appreciating very quickly and I always keep a price floor in operation but I did tell you eleven hundred so that's what I'll sell it to you for but it's worth fourteen most certainly" and that's the way he was going on and on through the afternoon - making at least three maybe four sales in the short half hour I was there with Busbee and the place was well-kept neat as a pin laid out real nicely and the walls were covered with landscape art in striking realism and striking color too and little captions and stuffed field game and fish and of course a hundred or two decoys - ducks and things of all sorts and all poses - and I guess if you're into designing your little den or atrium or something I guess they're cool enough and worth some bucks but you have to have the bucks first - to make the place for them and then to buy them - so that's already like twice the bucks already needed - way out of bounds as far as I see it and where will it all end up when everything comes crashing down around us I want to know - ghost towns ghost houses abandoned reliquaries and ruined homes ripe for plunder and looting and many many a dead homeowner overstretched by finance and trying desperately to protect all meager (now meaningless) possessions too but THAT'S the end of all mankind and the end of vanity and its penchant for collecting too BEAUTY BE DAMNED.