"Mrs. Cruz?"

In his fifties, a gray-haired hotel butler directs a black courtesy limousine to a stop in front of Aman's suite courtyard.

He didn't care about the slippery ground, and trotted in the direction of Mrs. Sakai.

The meticulous butler service of luxury hotels has always been a golden sign created by established global hotel giants such as Aman, Hilton and COMO to win the favor of high-net-worth customers.

These housekeepers are highly trained and on call 24 hours a day, with an average age of over 45 years old, and are experienced and well-connected.

The head butler at Aman Hotel proudly embroiders two crossed keys in gold thread on the chest of the black bespoke suit.

Only the strongest in the field of hotel housekeepers can obtain this honorary certification of "Golden Key".

From making sure the water temperature of the bathtub with rose petals in the room is exactly 41.5 degrees Celsius before guests make an appointment, to providing professional travel service guides, from temporary care to tickets to football rooms at the opera house, to buying asthma medicine and even emergency tracheostomy for customers, they are all professionals.

This golden key steward, who earns $300,000 a year, now looks sweaty on his face.

"The location of the car assigned to Miss Sakai is in the Leada area, so do you need me to contact the driver who drove the car to report Miss Sakai's condition? Madam. ”

The butler dipped his handkerchief with sweat from his forehead.

He knew the identities of the two long-term guests who lived in this small courtyard.

The wife and daughter of the well-known artist Kazunari Sakai.

The young lady Sakai hailed a car in the evening and wandered to the local slum of Yangon.

Katsuko Sakai claimed to have her mother's permission.

The concierge sent the car without review, and now the mother seems to be anxious to find her daughter.

The housekeeper doesn't know what's going on, in case this kind of underage VIP has any mistakes, whether the hotel has fulfilled its responsibility to take care of the venue, and the reputation will definitely be greatly hit.

Artists are very difficult to serve, and their influence in the upper class circles is huge, and their energy is more exaggerated than that of rock stars.

The housekeeper found Mrs. Sakai standing on the corridor at the door, her trench coat was not buttoned, and she looked like she was in a hurry to go out, but the whole person was staring at her phone, motionless, with a complicated complexion.

"Ma'am?"

He shouted softly again.

Mrs. Sakai remained like a sculpture, unresponsive.

She turned a deaf ear to the butler's shouts, her fingers gently zooming the screen in and out.

The butler glanced at the screen out of the corner of his eye, and found that it was a very strange work, and it should not have been finished yet.

It's not like an orthodox oil painting,

The decorative paintings hanging in the corridors of the Aman Hotel are carefully selected, and the butlers have a certain appreciation for art.

He found that although the painting could only be seen in general terms, it was really beautiful.

Different from the works of art I have seen, the brushstrokes are exotic, but not obscure.

The housekeeper involuntarily subconsciously glanced at it twice.

"Is it pretty?" Mrs. Sakai asked suddenly.

"I'm so sorry, ma'am, I didn't mean to."

The butler immediately took two steps back, he was only concerned about the situation of the guest, and he had no intention of probing into Mrs. Sakai's privacy.

"I'm not blaming you, I'm just asking what you think of this basemap."

Mrs. Sakai waved her phone at the butler and asked casually.

"It's a painting by Miss Sakai, it's very innovative, and it should be a good work." The butler knows the general situation of each VIP and knows that Miss Sakai herself is a well-known art genius in Asia.

"Not bad?"

Mrs. Sakai shook her head slightly.

She didn't really want to ask the hotel staff for advice.

Mrs. Sakai was just too surprised.

It's like if you suddenly see a beautiful mirage in the clouds, you will subconsciously want to ask the people around you if it is just an illusion in your mind.

She didn't expect to see Gu Weijing painting such a work at all.

It's a bit perverted!

Excellent technique is secondary, this feeling of perfect integration of Eastern and Western styles has already had the law and prototype of a famous master.

This is much more dazzling than a simple technique.

Techniques are such things that can be practiced slowly.

It is nothing more than a matter of the speed of growth, and this ability to control the collision and integration of cultures, many famous artists can't do it.

The Way of the Master,

It's in the middle of it.

"It's shocking, it's not bad, it's a little monster. Maybe he can really support each other with Katsuko to the end, maybe it's not true. ”

The thought came to Mrs. Sakai's mind.

"Forget it, children and grandchildren have their own children and grandchildren, so let the children go."

She thought of the heavens and humans fighting for a few seconds, and then suddenly relaxed.

Mrs. Sakai stomped her foot, turned around and walked back in the direction she came.

"Mrs. Cruz, you?"

The butler looked at Mrs. Sakai's back suspiciously.

"I don't need a car, I'm going back to my room to rest." Mrs. Sakai waved her hand, took out her mobile phone from her pocket, selected a contact, and said into the phone, "Hey, Ichisei is it?" ”

……

Chiyo-ku, Tokyo, ねぎま Yakitori shop.

The original meaning of "ねぎま" is a cooking method of barbecue skewers, in which fresh chicken breasts or thighs are threaded with bamboo skewers, and green onions or flattened garlic are spaced in between, and slowly heated over a charcoal fire.

The fat slowly seeps out from under the chicken skin during the grilling process, and the aroma of fat mixes with the flavor of green onion and garlic, making it sweet but not greasy, and it is the essence of Japanese cuisine.

This restaurant is called "Yaki Bird", and it does not belong to those Michelin Japanese dishes, which are very expensive.

On the contrary, there is a taste of the fly restaurant hidden in the fireworks of Sei, and in addition to various skewers, it also offers miso ramen that is about cooking and filling the stomach.

"Sakai-kun, I still have a good appetite." The chef, dressed in a lace-up white robe like a bathrobe, put three skewers of yakiniku beef on a black plate in front of Uncle Sakai and said with a smile.

"Oh!"

The fat and round Professor Kazunari Sakai put a skewer in his mouth, and with a pout, his throat rolled comfortably, and the whole skewer of meat disappeared.

He took a sip of the sake in the cup, happy as a 230-pound fat man.

"Master Otani is still a good craft, this meat is fragrant and relish!"

Kazunari Sakai gave a thumbs up and casually wiped the shiny grease from the corner of his mouth, without the style of an elegant artist.

In fact, Chef Otani's barbecue skills can only be called skilled.

It's not as big as the big yakiniku chains, not to mention the high-end kaiseki cuisine and the carefully cooked yakiniku steaks in Michelin-starred restaurants, from the ingredients to the craftsmanship that beats this small restaurant.

Probably the only advantage is cheapness.

A string of chicken skin yakiniku is 70 yen, chicken breast is 90 yen, beef yakiniku is 110 yen, and if you don't mind eating grilled chicken butts, a skewer costs only 50 yen, which can be eaten even by poor students who go to school in Tokyo.

East Asian Immortal Cultivation Three Volumes of Kings,

It is claimed that Dongxia people do not take vacations, Koreans do not sleep, and Dongying people do not eat.

The reason why people don't eat is because Japanese food is too expensive.

Living in Tokyo is not easy.

It's a very prosperous place, and the cost of living is very high, so it's normal to eat something good and spend six or seven thousand yen.

Uncle Sakai doesn't like anime, baseball, and idol stars like his peers.

His greatest hobby is eating.

When he was a young student, he would work as a part-time training instructor for the painting club of a private high school every Friday, and after class, he would drive to this small shop of only a dozen square meters.

While looking at the accounts in the notebook, I continued to calculate how much money was left to make up for the tuition fee for studying abroad, and I relaxed with a few skewers of barbecue.

Even if it hurts for a long time to eat two skewers of beef and roast birds, this is the happiest time he has ever had.

Now that Professor Sakai is so well established that he can buy this small shop ten times by selling any painting, and his wallet is enough for him to eat truffles as potatoes and foie gras as pork liver, but he still likes the atmosphere of this shop.

Especially when my wife is not at home and no one is supervising my weight.

Uncle Sakai often wanders over for supper.

Here is the taste of his memory,

In this small shop, he is not a great artist admired by hundreds of millions of people, he is still the "Sakai-kun" with a good appetite in the mouth of Master Otani.

Even though the classmate "Sakai-kun" has changed from a melancholy and beautiful man who is as thin as a bamboo pole to a chubby, round and happy meat ball, he is still very relaxed.

The only thing that didn't fit in with this small restaurant was the young man in a suit and leather shoes next to Professor Sakai Issei.

He was pale-complexioned, wore a Vacheron Constantin gold watch on his wrist, and his blonde hair was waxed smooth enough to make a fly split.

"Mr. Sakai, please, please think about the Mars Gallery, one or two oil paintings of 50 x 60 size or more can be delivered on a quarterly basis. $500,000 per entry. You will be offered a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich in four years, and Mars Gallery is willing to provide a signing fee of $8 million, so that the total price of the four-year contract can reach 50 million dollars. ”

The young man whispered to the big artists around him to sell the galleries he represented behind him, and his lips touched to be millions of dollars in contracts, as if it were not dollars but waste paper.

Hanks Mars is a hunter agent at Mars Gallery.

If the astronomical auction price is an instantaneous firework, then the selling price of the artist's work in the primary market such as the gallery is the bright light for the hearts of investors.

Speculation, bubbles, financial speculation, there are so many things that can affect the price of transactions in the ever-changing auction market, but the price in the gallery can remain basically stable for a long time.

In order to maintain the healthy development of the market and attract the interest of large collectors.

An unwritten unspoken rule of the industry is that

The works of the represented artists displayed in the top galleries will sell for slightly less than their future market estimates for the artist.

For a long time, the works sold in large galleries such as Gagosian and Lisson were often in the order of millions of dollars, but collectors usually made a profit when they bought them and held them in their hands for a few years.

This is a pattern of ascending to heaven with one left foot and one foot on the right foot.

The appreciation of the works of excellent agency painters drives the credibility of the gallery, and the credibility of the gallery gives collectors confidence to buy.

Behind almost any great artist stands a giant gallery.

The Giant Gallery is like a big team in football, and the excellent painters complement each other.

They can make a lot of money from the talent and fame of the artists, and in the event of a market price crash, the galleries behind them are willing to spend their money to save the artists.

The most classic case in the art market is Damien Hirst, who was briefly crowned the most valuable painter in the world.

The Hearst Millennium was marked by market volatility, a cold auction market, and a sharp drop in transaction prices.

It is rumored that it was the buyers under Larry Gagosian Gallery, the founder of Gagosian Gallery, who rushed into the market with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash flow to stabilize the market.

Picasso, Andy Warhol, Mondrian, Damien Hirst......

In today's world, any artist who is favored by such a giant gallery can only sell tens of millions of dollars in art transactions in this life, it is really a failure.

Anna Veyant, a high-value beauty painter in Canada, was worth more than 100 times in an instant just because she and Larry Gagosian were rumored to have some scandals by the paparazzi.

It is common knowledge that every art student knows that it is not the artists who can determine the trend and direction of the art market, but the galleries behind them.

Mars Gallery is such a gallery giant, or rather, it used to be.

This used to refer to before the 70s of the last century.

The Grand Galleries are not magicians, they may be able to sell brass for gold and gold for diamonds, but they can't sell shit for the price of gold.

Collectors aren't fools either.

If you want to sell for a sky-high price, the painter himself must at least be a piece of gold.

There are famous actors in singing, there are starring roles in movies, and the gallery must also have leading artists who can make people take their shots.

If you want to become a giant, it is not enough to be rich, but also to have enough art masters and works that collectors are familiar with.

Similar to Damian Hirst, Andy Warhol to Gagosian, Yayoi Kusama to OFA, and John Lennon's wife Yoko Ohno to Lisson Gallery.

Mars Gallery belongs to the old-school galleries,

Founded in 1943 in the smoke of World War II, it was once ranked among the top three in the industry, but after missing the pop wave in the 70s and giving up the opportunity to sign a contract with Andy Warhol at the last minute, there is no longer enough artist "town".

The promotion of several painters was not very successful, and the investment confidence of the well-connected collectors of the former Mars Gallery was greatly damaged.

Mars Gallery has also fallen from a giant gallery to the bottom of a first-tier gallery, and has begun to continue to develop like a second-rate gallery.

The Mars family desperately needs to produce a successful enough artist, if not great, to regain their former glory, and they have spared no expense to do so.

(End of chapter)