Idiosycratic Life

Hello, campers and camper-ettes. Greeting from the land of 85 degrees! I am a little envious of all the people up North who got snow days, especially as being back here in the heat makes me have Season Amnesia. My apartment complex is all decked out with Christmas lights and Big Plastic Santas and whatnot, but someone asked me about Thanksgiving, and I swear it feels like it was six months ago or however long it would take the weather to go from what it was in PA to change to what it is here. How bizz-ah.

Not too much to report, really, but I wanted to get back on the blog. :)

There is this giant art show for wealthy people happening here that usually happens in Basel, Switzerland, and this is the first time it's been held anywhere else. Apparently, when Sotheby's and Christie's and the other big auction houses and Obscenely Wealthy People decide to buy Picassos and Van Goghs and Degas (Degases? Degasi? Becky, any thoughts?), they all head to this show. And it's here. And you have to pay a LOT of money to get in to see the famous masterpieces and flash your Secret Weathy People Club Card, so it's not even like you can use this opportunity to see amazing art, blah blah blah.

A lot of other galleries in Miami, however, are holding big shows now because all the most important art critics and buyers and "private art consultants" (people who fly around the world scouring galleries for expensive artwork they buy on behalf of rich people who are too uninterested to pick out paintings they are going to spend a million dollars on for themselves- I KNOW. I want to be rich enough to have an Art Bitch. On the other hand, if I ever get that rich, I'm gonna be MY OWN Art Bitch. Yeah!) are here.

So I went out to cover this art show for the paper about up and coming Latin American artists for the Merald, which was pretty fun. There was this one piece, though, that was essentially a giant vagina made out of papier mache and tissue paper and fabric and I don't know what else, and the opening was stitched together with condoms. Ow. The artist wrote a message in Spanish and English, that appeared on either side of it, about the overpopulation of the third world and the inhumanity of being born to die of hunger. The piece was titled, "the Anti-venus." It was very powerful, actually.

So I was following this prim little old lady, a world-renowned art critic and her very elderly aunt around the show. The art critic was wearing this multi-colored shawl that she kept flinging around and huge round glasses like that Gorgon in those Old Navy commericals, you know? (although, I think that lady died. I probably shouldn't call her "the Gorgon.") And we got to the "Anti-venus." She starts going on about the use of the oval as symbolic of female genitalia in both medieval Christian art (I'll never look at those creepy gray Giotto madonnas the same way again) and indigenous Mayan cultures being recast as a symbol of the commericalization of the body in the Third World and on and on and Gwen calls my cell phone. The incongruity of this little old lady next standing this really big vagina and primly taking notes about it just made me want to bust out laughing and start screaming the entire story to G. in the middle of this gallery of Christie's buyers and so on.

But I didn't. Hooray, self-restraint! :) (I HAVE to get ask G how to upload photos....)