I Was Talking To My Art Dealer About Artists I Knew

(from the archive)

“You know, Andy, some of my friends, they’re in these little galleries, like: I have friends where their art is like in a gallery next to skateboards. Not for a special hip conceptual skateboard thing: always. One of my friends, his art is next to a guy playing a sitar and next to earrings. They sell sage at the counter–sprigs of it or whatever. They told him: we promise, no more drum circles in the gallery, as of last week. But today, right next to his art? Drum circle. And it’s got nothing drum circle-friendly about it–his art. That’s just his 2012. Being shown there.”

“There are different art worlds. It’s like music genres. Sometimes there are crossover hits.”

“Fine. Still: I think a lot of artists in galleries like you have in New York like to give the impression they don’t even know people who might have their art shown next to a skateboard or near a sitar. Like they don’t even know that could happen to art. These are our brothers and sisters: though, selling a painting that took half a year for a month’s rent in a yoga studio.”

“Ok: Sometimes I’m having dinner, and the table cloth is very white, and there are rolls on the table made of some German bread I’ve never even heard of, and I look into the ice in my glass and through the other side and everything is firm and clean in that ice-in-your-glass art-world way and the music is an electrochanteuse and I think: there is this art we look down on that’s about escapism–the cowboy picture art world, the magical wizard picture tattoo side-of-the-van art world, the expensive-lawn-Buddha art world–these are escapist art genres. But then I think maybe this too is an escapism: This fantasy that everything that is worth saying can be said in an elegant clean room in an art neighborhood to educated international people using this taut, oblique contemporary art language to people with bellies full of good wine. This is pretending things are only ever one way. It furthers a fantasy. Like reading a loooooooong article in The Atlantic that goes nowhere but gives you the impression, sitting on your couch, that you are a member of a world of ideas, not some jerk who has to find a babysitter in a half hour.”

“Yeah. Veblen escapism.”

“Someone would say everything is an escape from everything else. But they’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah, escape is temporary. Some things are the point.”

“The best things are.”