It’s interesting. Part of the reason I left L.A. was to get away from the fabricated world. How ever, any big city art scene is going to have fabricated people. By fabricated, I mean that people make themselves up to be what they think will be noticeable and appreciable rather than an extension of themselves.
We walked through several artists showings. The people in attendance at these things all looked like they were trying to put on the aire of the perfect artiste. I saw one young guy who had his hair styled in a half-pompodore on top with edge lines cut out horizontally along the sides of his head. His outfit defies any description beyond, “You spent at least 5 hours in the thrift store picking each piece that you felt would make a statement.” I evesdropped a conversation he was having with a pixie that I could not gender to save my own life. Sie was tiny and blonde and had a biiig pink handkerchief hanging out of her right pocket. (And you know what that means, girlfriends!) Sadly upon listining to the conversation I realized that pompodope was about as deep as your 4 year old’s Sesame Street plastic, summer pool.
The artwork showed promise. only two pieces really leaped out at me and said, “This is really good” Many of the artists also displayed pieces that felt more like they were trying to capture a statement that would be well received rather than digging into their inner soul to produce something from them. shimmeringjemmy and I had long conversations about artwork we saw. I was glad to be able to draw back on my Theatrical training and a wonderful course in articulating artistic opinion (called, ‘contemporary drama’) to give fairly deep and intelligent commentary about the art we saw. Translation: yup, I too can be an art critic.
The highlight (or lowlight if you will) of the evening was the arrival of the angry clown posse.Picture 1, Picture 2. While standing at the entrance of one building of gallery like offices in an alley on the ArtWalk, we heard a demonstration. Several people dressed as clowns were picketing. The signs and the yells were along the idea of, “Art is Theory”, “Down with Art” “Art is a myth!”, “Down with Dali!”, “Kiss my picAsso.” The lead clown had a megaphone. They all had the requisite bike horn. This was amusing for about 10 seconds. For me the amusement ceased when some irate art snot decided to throw a cup of either water or white wine down on the demonstrators below. My amusement ended because the dumping missed the clowns entirely and landed on shimmeringjemmy and I instead.
The clowns proceeded to go into galleries with their rigamarole (Thank the Gods for spell checkers, I always wondered how that was spelt) The demonstration became less and less humourous to me. Especially when they’d boisterously crowd into a gallery, spout their message, and make it utterly impossible for any other patron to actually look at the art on display. There was a lot of shoving (not the “intentionally aggressive” kind, more of the “big city, I just don’t care what I do” kind). I contemplated (for about a minute) analyzing the demonstration as art. Perhaps how I’d appeal to one of them about the frivolity of calling anything in our world “theory”. I contemplated how a true clown would act the fool and not even acknowledge debate or argument, and decided to do my best to avoid them.
They stayed in acoustically unfortunate areas so their clambouring and honking was overtly noticeable. One of the people I met during the evening fashioned herself a writer (and I am also told a kink model.) We talked about the flurry of art-smush-speak I could come up with expressing the “abstract dichotomy of a clown’s lack of inhibition to rebel against an inner conflict over the definition… blah blah blah.”
Then the director kicked in. I was annoyed by the clowns… I went to the happy place in my brain and took out my toys, and started cutting the scene.
This didn’t happen, but it would have been sooooo sweet.
