I posted a video from X earlier this week which featured a woman speaking effusively about a rather dubious art exhibit. By sheer chance, I happen to be reading a book - The Mysterious Mickey Finn, by Elliot Paul - which features, among other things like kidnapping, a royalist plot and numerous strange deaths, the seamier side of the art world. I was delighted to come across the following passage, which subtly describes the sleazier sort of art dealer without actually using the words "sleazy art dealer":
The clerk reached behind a false Tintoretto depicting Christ throwing the money changers out of the temple, and opened a door of a hidden vault in which three sets of books were kept, one for the French government, one for publicity purposes, and one for the partners themselves.
The mental image of a painting of Christ driving out the moneylenders - a false old master, at that - being used to hide the evidence of the art dealers' ill-gotten gains struck me as quite...um...what's the word Spurgeon?
"Droll, sir?"
"Yes, yes. Droll, that's what it was. Thanks, dear fellow".
2 comments:
Some years back I befriended a local artist, an old fellow (now gone) who did these great depictions of the local bush, with actual bits of gum trees added but it looked great.
Anyway he took me to his exhibit in the local art fest, where artists stood next to their works. Apart from him it was all women. You could smell the estrogen. One woman had painted this huge canvass of herself looking accusingly out of the painting, 'You! You did this to me!' Technically it was very good, but who would hang it on their wall?
My friend's gentle bush paintings were exhibited among a sea of competing 'strong' women trying to get the public's attention with increasingly hysterical themes - this was 15 yrs ago anyway. That exhibition you posted struck me as a way around the mass of competing women - simple bands of colour, like fabric designs!
PS, that Elliot Paul was a character:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Paul
A friend of Gertie Stein, living with the Montparnasse expat set after WW1. He edited a magazine which promoted Dada art etc. He 'had a nervous breakdown' and went to Ibiza to recover.
I already looked up how Henry Miller experimented with amphetamines in the 1930s to give his novels zing, or just to keep awake for the hours of labour. So 'nervous breakdown' in those days could be caused by coming off a drug binge, maybe to meet a deadline. We read a lot about these artistic types having 'nervous breakdowns' in those days, then mid-century 1960s you don't hear the term anymore, why?
I just remembered my friend the artist entered an altar triptych in that exhibit with a room full of feminists. Christ crucified in the centrepiece. I glanced at it while the woman with the accusing self-portrait glared down at us - she seemed to dominate the room. What an awkward scene. As I was the only member of the public present she focused on me.
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