Resistance and Art Gallery Openings

Today one of my graduate students invited me to a group art show of people from her program. It is only in the building next to mine and I'm going to try and make it. This officially represents a change in attitude. Usually I get invited to these things all the time and then don't bother to go, even if the show is literally in the same building that I work in. In the past I was too grumpy to stay at work even one minute past the end of the day but now I'm going to make more of an effort to look at the art here. Plus, it will help me bond better with my students and perhaps I can even call it an Artist's Date.

(Photo by Brendan Gogarty)

For some reason I've been prompted to think about why I hate art openings. I mean, I hate them with a passion and they give me a headache. I try to think of reasons why I hate them but I can't. I say that I hate the pretentious art scene (true) but I can't quite figure out the real reason. They are a real flash point of anger for me and I can't figure out why.

In writing this I tried to remember if I ever liked art openings. I can remember one rainy Saturday when I was in my late teens (18 or 19) and I was out exploring the city neighborhood we had recently moved in to. As I was walking home I saw a little gallery that had an opening and I went it. At that time I didn't have any art education and didn't even have a GED. The opening represented a world that I hoped to be in one day. I went in and looked at the art and had some free finger food. The artist was an older man who painted watercolors of cityscapes so he wasn't a pretentious art person. It was a positive and pleasant experience. I went home thrilled with my new experience.

In art school I went to my friends openings a lot for shows on campus. These were informal student affairs where someone baked cookies and the art was hung on the walls of one of the school hallways or tiny exhibition spaces. I also went to the more formal shows that the school put on featuring established artists in their bigger public exhibition spaces. Those were fun, too because I generally knew everyone and the art was usually interesting. Since I was in school I could get more out of what I saw and relate it to what I was learning. Plus, the Exhibitions Director was a notorious spendthrift and the food was very fancy and expensive -- he even ordered sushi on occasion!

I think at the end of Art School the art opening thing went sour. Four of us had a senior thesis show in one of the school's galleries, including my studiomate. By then I had been through lots of drama with her because she broke up with her longtime boyfriend and spent a lot of time drinking and getting into trouble. Her mom swept in and took control of the food and everything for the opening. The rest of us were upset by their attention grabbing and crazymaking.

Then, a couple of years after I graduated college my father had an important show but he didn't care about the opening and so I ended up doing the food. I hated his passive aggressive approach to it as he didn't ask me but let the work fall on me anyway. Then, I had to hang around at the opening but I couldn't be an artist, people only saw me as the daughter of the artist. (This is another issue I have -- people have openly implied that I'm not a "real" artist, I'm only copying after my dad. In my private writing I recognized the main perpetrator of this idea as someone who has serious issues of their own so perhaps I can let this go soon.)

Anyway, so I've avoided openings ever since. I want to go back and enjoy them as fun again and be an artist in my own right around other artists.