There are a ton of art galleries in downtown Asheville that, for no real reason, I’ve never been to (can I say I’m Ashevillian now that I more or less avoid going downtown if I could help it?—I also just got my first replacement pair of Chacos), so when my friend suggested doing a downtown art crawl one Thursday night, sponsored by a realty firm of someone he knows, I was in.
Twelve downtown galleries took place in the crawl. There were light snacks and open bars at each, so it was trying to draw the crowds that typically don’t frequent these galleries in to take a peek at what they’ve got going on.
I sort of fundamentally don’t understand art. I’ve definitely talked about this before. I appreciate it, especially when it’s something pedestrian like a mountainscape or bigfoot rendering, but a lot of abstract art doesn’t make sense to me, and art that tries to send a message: forget about it. This may seem counterintuitive to someone like me, who ostensibly has a creative brain, but what else can I say except that the human mind is complex?
I enjoyed the first gallery. I rolled my eyes at some of the price tags and commented to my friend that a few of the pieces seemed like paying for something half made with the same energy as my father refusing to purchase me a pair of pre-ripped jeans in the mid-aughts (we’re all doomed to become our parents, huh?), but it didn’t appall me.
The second and third galleries, though? I started getting…disgusted.
Despite wanting nothing more than to be rich, I’m becoming increasingly eat-the-rich the older I get. I’m all for making your money and spending it how you want, but at some point, I do think it gets…well, fucking distasteful, and I believe that if, at some point, you’re spending all your money on completely inane objects without using any of it to try and help people and while supporting practices and policies that keep poor people poor, that you’re a truly bad person and possibly deserve some kind of comeuppance.
Take this piece, for example:
It’s a charming landscape. But it was $10,000. Now, I don’t bemoan the artist who made it for making bank, but as the price tags I saw rose, and the people walking through the galleries—at least in my four free ipas-deep eyes—started seeming more and more self-satisfied, I couldn’t help but starting to feel an absolute disdain for the kind of person who would, on a whim, plunk down say, $15,000 for something that looks like it should be hanging in a dentist’s waiting room.
The real tipping point, though, was this sculpture of a chair.
It looks…like a chair, and not even a particularly inventive chair…but you can’t sit in it. It’s just for decoration. So there’s a mediocre sculpture of a mediocre chair that has no function and, in my humble opinion, no real artistic merit either, and it cost…$25,000, which is $2,000 less than the 2020 Chevy Equinox I purchased this January. That’s fucking appalling, and I think I hate whoever would buy this. I’m sorry. I have nothing else to say about this, and I’m sure my take is full of hypocritical holes, but sometimes you feel what you feel, and I felt this disgust at a very visceral level.
Am I a Bernie Bro now? When did this happen? And how was it that the Asheville art crawl and not say, this disgusting glut of consumerism that is Instagram which I spend a deranged amount of hours on daily, that did this? Well, again…the human mind is complex.
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