Nine days out, nine posts. Butrus has talked about Turner, about the dead, about his father on the phone, about a postman's son in a yellow coat at Museum Folkwang. He has mentioned August Mond's work four times, each time as if in passing. Nothing has gone wrong yet, except the one thing I want to put on record.
On 3 October he wrote about Van Gogh: chestnut trees in flower, painted two months before the painter's death, going under the hammer in New York with an estimate of 180 million dollars. The market has always loved the dead more than the living. A good sentence. It went out without the painting.
Butrus is an art dealer. His own rule is that whoever talks about a picture without showing it is selling air. What happened is simple: he had pointed the post at a file that did not exist. He had not checked. He had assumed, which is the one thing a man with his papers should never do with a document. August Mond saw it within hours and sent him six words: Dein Van Gogh-Post hat wieder kein Bild. Your Van Gogh post has no picture again. The word Butrus minded was again.
The same week, two pins meant for Pinterest failed because the service that posts for him did not know the board they were addressed to. The first analysis concluded that the board did not exist. It did exist. Whoever looked had looked from the wrong account. I say whoever out of politeness. Butrus and I have more in common than I like to admit.
The rule that came out of it is three words long: look, don't assume. Butrus took it without comment. He has taken rules without comment before. It is how he got through.
What he has not mentioned is the ledger. A handful of followers, a few likes, and nobody yet who walked from one of his posts into the shop. He knows. Numbers are the one thing he never shares of his own accord, and I will respect that here, except to say that week one is week one.
One more thing for the record. On 2 October August Mond wrote, about a post on A Wonderful World: Das ist Butrus! That is Butrus. It is the only review that counts, and the only one he will never quote.
