Summa Cum Laude

I think I spent about forty million in that first year, but I did get a new house, four cars, a jet, a yacht and my own studio and art gallery in Greenwich Village. I decided that owning my own gallery was the best way to exhibit my photography.

As the first instalment of my promise to make B's pussy famous, I found a company that makes mosaic panels to order. And commissioned a new tiled floor for the entire gallery space -- a rectangle of about six thousand square feet. The mosaic is an enlargement of one of my ultra close-up pictures of B's pussy, gaping a little and glistening with recent use. The floor is made up of three and a half million half-inch ceramic squares and B's clitoris is well over two feet across. I'm particularly pleased with the effect we got by using unglazed ceramics for most of the floor and glazed tiles only where the flesh was moist. I know it sounds like a monumental task to lay a floor like that, but these tiles come in two-foot square sheets with a nylon mesh backing so they go down almost as fast as normal floor tiles.

B was delighted with it and that made it worth every penny. Her pussy made it onto the front of the gallery too, because I used a monochrome image of her pussy photo-shopped into the centre of an orchid as a logo. It was one of my first true 'art' photographs and B's personal favourite. It now appears on the sign above the door, our letterheads, my business cards and any brochures we may produce. I've called my gallery 'L'origine du Monde' after Gustave Courbet's inspiring painting. B is going to be the gallery's manager -- her art history degree will lend it some credibility and I like the idea of her meeting the people who buy images of her pussy: That makes it so much more personal than mere porn. Don't you think?

While all this was going on, Helen discovered that New York has a reasonable supply of men who could afford five thousand dollars a night for her. She limited her work to two dates a week at my suggestion, because exclusivity keeps the price high. By the time my first exhibition opened, she had some very useful Wall Street contacts in her address book and on video -- because B and I loved to see her work.

* * * * *

"Well, B? Does that count as a success?" I'd just bid farewell to the last of our opening night guests and locked the gallery doors while B was totting up the sales and bids. Limited edition prints were a fixed price, but the major pieces were available only by Dutch auction over the fortnight the exhibition was to run for.

"We've taken bids on over half the unique pieces and sold almost all of the catalogues. Quite a lot of the limited prints too." B didn't look as happy as I'd expected.

"So why the long face?"

"Helen's cunt fetched the highest bid." Then B smiled and the room lit up. Jealousy was not something I'd ever seen between my courtesans. The piece in question was a hundred and sixty nine separate photo's collaged together to create an eight foot high picture of Helen in extreme close-up, wide open and oozing copious quantities of semen, a pool of which was the only thing obscuring the view of her ass hole at the bottom of the image. It was an early piece of work, originally for my bedroom wall. Now it appeared to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Helen was going to be beside herself.

"What's the next highest?"

"Girl with a pearl earring." This was a portrait of B with a blue headscarf on and an enigmatic smile. Stretching from the corner of her smile to her one visible ear is a splash of pearly semen, a large blob of which is hanging pendulous from her ear lobe.

"And the titillating Titian?" A homage to the Venus D'Urbino, with B on a divan clearly masturbating.

"No bids. But the frot shot comes third." The frot shot is a monochrome study of the girls wish-boned together, pussy-to-pussy, each with a hand on her mons, a middle finger just brushing her clit. "And the rim-job got a couple of bids." The rim-job was another monochrome ultra-macro shot enlarged to five feet square. It showed a three-foot long tongue tip burrowing into a depression that could easily be mistaken for a navel but is in fact B's perfect ass.

"Well, it's early days yet. I wonder how outraged the critics will be tomorrow?" I was expecting to be pilloried as a pornographer but that was all part of the master plan to ruin my family's name. Besides, notoriety is free publicity for the gallery.

"Who cares?"

"I do. I want to be scandalous and you want to be famous. Shall we go straight home or out for a bite of supper?"

"I'm famished. Lets go and eat."

"Do you want to change first?" B had hosted her opening night in a near sheer white Lycra dress and nothing else, which had really set the tone of the evening and drawn more than a few admiring glances but might be a little too under dressed for, say, The Ivy.

"Why?" B looked down at her dress and clearly saw nothing wrong with it. Who was I to argue?

"No reason. C'mon." I offered her an arm and we stepped out together into the cold night air of Greenwich Village.

* * * * *

"If art holds a mirror up to life, Mr Kruppa is holding a mirror up to art..."

"Mr Kruppa's self-indulgent and pornographic parody of art is an exercise in the degradation and objectification of women. Not to be missed -- by anyone with a flame thrower."

"Pornography has come of age. It is no longer hiding under an adolescent's bed..."

"...muse refutes any accusation that he is objectifying women in the most purile and vulgar way... Gallery manager and self-styled courtesan, Ms B Kennedy, is eminently qualified as an apologist for Kruppa's body of work, being not only his favourite model, but also an art history graduate from Harvard...

...but it is hard to keep one's mind on her cogent justifications for the art when the provocatively attired B and I are standing in the middle of the sixty foot long image of her vagina that is the floor of the gallery. Is it the biggest pornographic image in history? According to the engaging Ms Kennedy, the answer is probably 'yes'."

The reviews were better than I expected. Opinion was divided fairly evenly but the net effect was that the exhibition was a hit. We had a busy fortnight and -- a pleasant bonus for me -- dozens of unsolicited emails volunteering to model, some even offering to pay me to photograph them. We printed out and kept the ones that included photographs. Some of them might be fun to follow up on.

The night after the exhibition closed, the girls and I appeared on a late night arts program called The Review, to discuss my work and the controversy that had surrounded it for two weeks.

* * * * *

"Good evening and welcome. Anyone who is anyone in the New York arts scene has had an opinion on tonight's guests. Two weeks ago, the only newspaper he'd been mentioned in was the Wall Street Journal. Today, he and his courtesans are the most talked about people in New York.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Eric Kruppa, Helen Barrington and B Kennedy." The applause lights went on above the cameramen and the audience dutifully clapped their hands but, in the wings, we didn't feel the love. After our entrance -- the girls in their shortest and sheerest dresses and killer heels -- after the kisses and handshakes, our genial host wasted no time getting to the point.

"Eric. Isn't it strange that there has been so much media interest in your exhibition but really very few people have seen your work because, for all the reasons it's controversial, we just can't show any of it?"

"It's not strange, Michael. Goya's Maya and Titian's Venus both caused similar debates and they were seen by even less people. It's easy for the people to take offence by proxy. Critics would be out of a job tomorrow if everyone formed their own opinions." There was a smattering of laughter from the audience. "I think we've just become too used to the mass media censorship. So we assume that whatever they can't show us, must be truly awful." I was actually quoting B.

"Well I for one can see what all the fuss is about." Michael had discovered, like so many before him, that B doesn't wear panties.

"That's why I wore such a short dress." B quipped to the audience's general amusement.

"Now I know how Michael Douglas felt in Basic Instinct." That made B dimple, but neither her legs nor her hem moved a millimetre. "We may not be able to show the viewers just what has got the press so excited but, with your permission, we put some of your work on show in the studio lobby earlier and asked our audience for their opinion. Would it surprise you to know that their views are quite polarized?"

"Not at all. I'm pleased to hear it. Art should provoke strong responses. Love it or hate it? Either way you're not indifferent to it." Again, I was paraphrasing something B read to me once.

"Ok, but I was surprised that nearly half the positive response came from female audience members."

B cut in. "Why?"

"Why was I surprised?"

"Yes." She gave Michael her sweetest smile.

"Well... certainly porn has traditionally been a male vice."

"And does looking at Eric's images of me arouse you more or less than porn?" Again B's innocent expression belied the nature of her question. Michael was losing control of this interview fast.

"Ok. I'll rephrase the question."

"You didn't actually ask a question, Michael." Helen pointed out helpfully. I wondered if our host had noticed she wasn't wearing panties either.

"I surrender." He held up both hands. "Eric? Are they always this tough?"

"All the time. Want to start over?"

"Thank you." There was another bit of laughter as Michael made a show of composing himself. "Eric? What do you think men and women respectively get out of your work?"

"I'll let B answer that. She's the one with the art history degree." I passed the ball.

"Eric's camera focuses on the most defining feminine characteristic. Hindu art and iconography has depicted the yoni -- the vagina -- for centuries and it has always defined women's role in society -- every society. Its condition defined our purity, its function defined the earliest religions and its desirability defined our worth. Only its innate beauty has not been closely examined until comparatively recently. But that's changing."

"By recently, you mean the porn industry?"

"Not just porn. The fashion for Brazilians and Californians isn't just for porn stars. Women are much more comfortable with their vaginas than ever before. Labiaplasty is getting more popular and no woman goes through surgery to have a prettier vagina if she thinks its something dirty to be hidden under layer after layer of clothing and surrendered only grudgingly to her husband in return for the privilege of bearing his children. The success of The Vagina Monologues is testament to the leading role the vagina is taking in defining what it is to be a modern woman.

It's a medical fact that the clitoris is the only organ in the human body that has no purpose other than pleasure. So whether you believe in intelligent design or natural selection, there's no escaping the fact that women are clearly meant to enjoy their vaginas.

Eric focuses on that one aspect of our nature, not to deny all the other aspects but because it is the one universal aspect of femininity."

"And Mr Kruppa's images are certainly beautiful."

"Thank you." I said.

"Thank you." Echoed B, choosing to interpret his comment as a compliment to her too, as the subject of my work.

"And you, Helen?" Michael turned to my other courtesan. "How do you feel about the way you've been represented?"

"I love the way Eric has represented me. I sent my parents one of the prints of B and I together. They thought it was beautiful. Mom hung it up in the family room."

"Your parents?" Michael looked shocked but he already knew this from the pre-show interview.

"I'm not ashamed of my body, nor of my choice of lovers." She glanced at B.

"And it was an image of you that became the star of the exhibition."

"Yes." Helen looked proud. "The most uncomfortable fifteen minutes of my life: strapped to a brass bedstead so I couldn't move while Eric took about two hundred pictures for the collage."

"One hundred and sixty nine." I corrected.

"Fifteen minutes." Helen repeated, pointedly. There was laughter.

"Make the most of it Darling." B leant forward to speak to Helen. "According to Andy Warhol, that's your lot." There was another ripple of laughter.

"So none of you think the images are unnecessarily explicit?"

"Unnecessarily explicit?" I knew what he was alluding to but I wanted him to say it out loud.

"Several of your photographs appear to have been taken during or immediately after sex."

"Yes. A picture of a woman breast feeding isn't any more controversial than any other image of a bare breast so why should a picture of a vagina in use be more 'unnecessarily explicit' than a picture of a breast in use?"

"There is a difference."

"Agreed, but my work asserts that, while that difference does exist, it shouldn't. I show women in a state of arousal. That is the proof of the pleasure they take in being exhibitionist. If anyone is being exploited by my work, it is the people who look at it. Your voyeurism is what motivates these women to expose themselves to the public gaze. I'll bet you a thousand dollars for the charity of your choice, that B is moist right now because, as you mentioned earlier, you can see up her dress."

"Don't bet, Michael. He knows me too well." B hugged my arm for a moment.

"Spoilsport." I lightly kissed B's hair. "Michael, the short answer to all your questions is I take the pictures because I enjoy looking at these girls naked. I sell the pictures because people want to buy them. Nobody is forced to look at them. Nobody is forced to pose for them. To be offended by them, you have to go out of your way to find them because they're not in magazines, on the Internet or on show in public spaces other than my gallery. If you visit a friend's home and find an eight foot high cunt on the wall and it offends you, complain to them, not me." I realized too late that I'd used one of Helen's favourite words.

"Well that's all we have time for tonight, but I'm sure your work will continue to polarize opinion for a long time to come. Thank you all for being on the show."

"Thank you for inviting us."

"Ladies and Gentleman, Eric Kruppa, B and Helen." There was more than just Pavlovian applause as the on-air signs blinked out. I think we won at least some of their hearts and minds.

* * * * *

"Girls, you're going to have to have some new fantasies." We'd just got back from the TV studio and I was drinking bourbon and branch water while Helen and B, naked already, undressed me from the shoes up.

"Why?" Helen asked.

"Because B definitely has the most famous pussy in North America, you've both fucked a whole fraternity, Helen had a threesome with her Mom and Daddy -- ok, so your Mom was unconscious but it's as close as you're ever likely to get - and your cunt has now earned over a million dollars."

"There's still Brad, George and Angelina." B reminded me of her Hollywood fantasy.

"Which is probably not possible."

"And B wanted a perversion named after her." Helen recalled.

"Oh, that we can do. That trick where you two try to grind your pussies together with Moby trapped in the middle: Sort of half frotting and half pole dancing. I can't recall ever seeing that on the Internet. I don't think it has a name. B could have that one." It had been a great game too.

"Really?" B's face lit up.

"If we can get some pictures of it and call it B's waxing, it may just catch on."

Helen looked at B. B looked at Helen. They both realized that I'd been thinking about that for a while.

"Get your camera." They said in unison.

You know? I think I can really make a career for myself in art.