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?”

ZOMBIES OF WESTON-SUPER-MARE

Oh dear: another day, another informant, another so-called art gallery with their hand out to artists for money: The Lloyd Gill Gallery. Although sketchy website design, rampant typos, bad syntax, dodgy. Punctuation And random Capitalisation are par for the course with these people, I fear in this case that the whole project may truly be the work of somebody who’s genuinely mentally unwell or somewhere on the autistic spectrum, so I can’t bring myself to be too harsh. For reasons that will become clear, I also fear that Mr Gill might pursue me with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I’ll try to restrict myself to enumerating some of the reasons why I personally would not want anything to do with this gallery.

Reason 1. It’s in Weston-Super-Mare. I’ve nothing particularly against backwaters because I live in a backwater too, but I don’t delude myself that my living room is a commercial gallery.

Reason 2. This photo:

Fawlty Towers + HP Lovecraft = The League of Gentlemen <=> This picture of Lloyd Gill Gallery.  This is a local gallery for local people. Don’t touch or covet the precious things of the local gallery. The wonky writing on the sign is highly reminiscent of Basil Fawlty’s deranged follies and of the titles from the show, which every week featured a new, mischievous anagram of Fawlty Towers on the hotel’s sign. Here are my suggestions for LGG:

GOLLY ALLERGY HELL LTD

THEY’LL DRY ILLEGAL LOG

DAILY GEL HELL TRILOGY

DRILL EGG, YELL TALLY HO

LETHAL LEGGY LILY LORD

YELL LETHALLY, DOG GIRL

LIGHT LAGER DOLLY YELL

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.

ABUSING THE ARTAHOL

An example of the so-called “press” comments at the website of Parallax Art Fair, yet another in the seemingly endless parade of parasitic vanity venues for people who can’t really hack it but like to maintain the affectation that they’re artists:

“I have been an ‘artaholic’ all my life– first as an artist then tapestry designer, then gallery owner for 25 years– and this blew me over!! I am sending word to everyone I know would be interested. Keep it going—!” – Visitor, SW6″

Ah, Visitor SW6, that well known journal of record for the art world. Careful, that artahol will kill you in the end. You’ll start caching artahol around the house and behind all the tapestries, artahol before breakfast just to feel functional and stabilised. You’ll think that people don’t know about what you imagine is all a super secret artahol habit, but they do know. Perhaps it was the huge intake of artahol that made it so easy for her to be blown over. You know, like when Dean Martin said you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.