THE ORA… THE ORA…

Ten international galleries want you, like a vampire bat wants sleeping cattle. Premio Ora (“Premium Hours”) says that the “basic registration fee required as partial coverage for organizational expenses” is €60 to enter three art works for consideration. Poor things, only covering their organisational expenses partially. Each additional image after the first three is only €5 and luckily for them you, it’s possible to enter an unlimited number of works.

Yes, it’s another sketchy “opportunity” for artists to enter a competition where they pay for the remote opportunity of possibly getting an unpaid gallery show, i.e. something that an artist should usually be paid for, or at the very least should not have to pay for in order to be considered. I’m providing links here for the purpose of verification; I wouldn’t suggest visiting any of them unless you want to know which international galleries are involved in this farrago and I would therefore recommend in the strongest possible terms that you don’t ever have any dealings with whatsoever.

A bona fide artist who is having an exhibition at an art gallery is not a “winner” and does not pay all the costs of transporting and exhibiting their work. Any artist who does so is a customer, and they should have their service– i.e. in this case their work shown in the gallery for two weeks– provided to them without quibbles and without all this pretence of meritocratic selection or curatorial oversight.

I DOUBT SHE CAN EVEN SPELL “PHILANTHROPY”

DERP. This is the closest Anita can get to the human expression known as “smile” when she’s wearing her rigid Anita flesh mask.

Hello darlings, mwah mwah mwah, thank you so much for coming– I thought you were still in Dubai for the arms fair! Art collector and spender of her husband’s dirty money Anita Zabludowicz (see Apotheosis of the idiot) has excelled herself recently with her Art Diary [sic] about a trip to India. Never has an art diary had so little to do with either art or diaries. Or a basic level of literacy, empathy and emotional fluency. Apparently it makes her sad that the poor people in India don’t smile. Cheer up, bastards. She needn’t get on her high horse, anyway. I’ve never seen a photo of her– and she has herself photographed constantly– where her face even seemed physiologically capable of smiling. She also says:

“The locals could not do enough for us, they only wanted to please us and this was their reward, I wish us Brits were more like that.”

Lovely little brown people, adorable! A bit dirty, though. I think you’ll find that they’d prefer their reward to be money and not having to live in servile destitution and desperate squalor, Anita. I’m pretty sure Gandhi is still available on DVD; I suggest you watch it. On behalf of every man, woman and child in all the nations of the United Kingdom, I also apologise wholeheartedly for us not being subservient or powerless enough for you, Big Z. Don’t worry, though, your husband’s cowering accomplices in the Conservative Party are making some progress towards rolling back all our hard-won freedoms and accomplishments. It’ll be just like India, not even India now but India a century ago! “I say, Lady Zabludowicz, frightful bad luck… was aiming for the tiger and one of your bally rickshaw-wallahs got in the way. Blasted his head right orff. Send my condolences to the widow, and so forth. Now, where’s that blasted tea?”

SHOW ( ME THE MONEY ) ARTISTS

The filename of this image is “coolsm”, which I presume refers to the copy… but S&M is also cool. In this narrative I think the artists who submit work are the masochists which must make Show Artists the doms. THEY WANT TO SEE “IT” AND THEY’LL SHOW YOU, OH YES. The safe phrase is “get lost”.

Hello everybody, my name is DJ Artistair and when I’m not DJing at the coolest Chilean clubs (I specialise in Monkstep, but you won’t have heard of it yet because I’m cooler than you), or testing out new men’s hair products, or having laser eye surgery or posing for generic stock photography, I Exhibit & Sell [sic] my art, which consists of TV test cards and small obsolete racing cars. Because “cards” and “cars” sound almost the same, so my work is interrogating the po(li/e)tics of homonymy.

Not really. Actually I’m much more handsome than this and I haven’t worn a waistcoat since before the Second World War. What really happened is that Show Artists took it upon themselves to spam me with their spamming stick, so I thought I’d give them some of the publicity they crave. I think the appropriate cliché is “be careful what you wish for.” Sorry guys, I may have suffered every indignity as an artist except popularity but I’m not a moron and unfortunately for you I have considerably more sense than money. Not the first one of these I’ve been subjected to, but it’s as stupid as any of them.

THE VINYL MUSE™

“Inspired by Van Gogh”. Signing myself into a mental institution now to escape from this horrible world. Bye.

In case there remained some doubt that any artist’s work can be recuperated and assimilated by the masters of capitalism, I present the Barbie Collector Museum Edition which has found a whole new way to exploit dead artists. Living artists: all you have to do is die and stay that way for a few centuries while your work accumulates value and is at length immortalised (and presumably– cheekily– trademarked) by Mattel, Inc.

“Leonardo da Vinci Barbie doll evokes the mysterious Mona Lisa with her enigmatic expression, long flowing hair, and brocade gown featuring a laced satin bodice with beautifully detailed sleeves.” “Gustav Klimt Barbie doll echoes the artist’s portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, reflecting the painting’s Byzantine mosaics and Egyptian motifs.”

Most horrifying of all, there’s the “Barbie doll inspired by Vincent Van Gogh” which “captures the mood of the magnificent masterpiece, ‘The Starry Night.’ She wears a strapless cocktail dress with a Cypress tree accent in black flock fabric, and the swirling patterns of the painting are echoed in her circular earrings, molded metallic sandals, and wavy hair.”

With either a total lack of irony or balls the size of an elephant’s, Mattel have appropriated the (at one time reviled and virtually worthless) work of an anguished mentally ill man who is equally famous for [a] barely selling any work while he was alive and [b] cutting off part of his own ear after an altercation with a prostitute. And they’ve appropriated it in the anachronistic and yet strangely appropriate form of a doll who looks like a Marcel-waved Manhattan Party Girl from the 1950s, i.e. a high class prostitute.

I’m sure the bloody and disconcerting Marina Abramovic Barbie is already in the pipeline, but what about a Cindy Sherman Barbie? Or a Hans Bellmer Barbie? Chapman Brothers Barbie-Ken? Matthew Barney Barbie caked in Vaseline? Frida Kahlo Barbie Bus Stop Play Set? Where are Drinking Himself to Death with An Income From His Rich Parents Ken? Sentimental Misogynist Pre Raphaelite Ken? Francis Bacon Ken with matching Rough Trade Ken?

THE OTHER ART FAIR: ANOTHER CORRECTION

When Ryan Stanier of The Other Art Fair wrote to me begging that I delete my posts about it because I was damaging his business, and later importuned me in person in the same regard, I said that I would not do that but I would correct any factually incorrect information I had provided. Unfortunately in my first article I’d understated the cost to artists of exhibiting in this show. Now a little bird has told me that the OAF’s prices have gone up again. See drop menu near bottom of the linked page, after all the artist statement and CV smokescreen stuff. Yeah, as if they accept or reject people solely on their artistic merit and charging them is an afterthought… 3m of wall space and “two spotlights” (woo!) now costs £745+VAT (Value Added Tax of 20% which is charged on most commercial products or services in the UK). It costs £1610+VAT for 7m of wall and four spotlights. For this kind of money those spotlights had better be some kind of King Kong searchlight bastards.

Perhaps, some might say, the upfront costs don’t matter so much and it’s a good investment if the artist gets to sell their work. Well, these artist-milking businesses actually rely on aspiring artists having this kind of woolly quasi-capitalist mindset and yet being too desperate– or frankly, sometimes, just too dim– to do the maths. They have their profit margins nicely worked out, of that I can assure you. If you’re an artist, do yourself a favour and start being realistic about your own costs, investments and profits too.  You can see my calculations on the previous post if you’re interested, but it suffices here to say that Stanier himself claims that the “average artist” (ha ha, you said it Ryan) at the OAF makes £1200 over two fairs. Unfortunately (even leaving aside transportation, subsistence, plus the labour and materials involved in making the work to begin with) the stand costs alone leave an artist who makes sales of £1200 over two fairs still clearly at a significant financial loss. And another very pissed off little insider bird who feels rather foolish now tells me that they coughed up the money to exhibit at the OAF and they didn’t sell a single thing.

If you’re determined to work for nothing and show your work for nothing, then for the love of Baby Warhol and the Twelve YBAs, please, please at least stop lining the pockets of these shysters while you do so. Even in deep austerity Britain there are low-cost or no-cost alternatives, artist unions, studio groups and artist networks who will advise and support you without any kind of exploitative, cynical agenda. Invest your money in yourself. Help yourself and other artists by starting your own artist collective or gallery instead, and help to put the OAFs of this world out of business.