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Everyone wants to be an artist. Nobody wants to be a plumber. Thing is plumbers make good money and live in nice houses. They can afford nice holidays with their nice families and when they go to snu at the end of the day they sleep the sleep of men who have contributed something useful to the wider community. Sure, plumbers smell like shit, but so do most artists and what have artists got to show for their toil other than a few mouldy drawings under their houses and extreme anxiety caused by an overwhelming sense of worthlessness? Not much. However there are tiny little occasions when an artist gets to revel in his profession and one such occasion is the art show. This month I’m gonna show you how to make one!
To make an art show the first thing you need is art. Sounds logical but it’s easier said than done. The problem here is that even if you’ve somehow managed to create a body of work you actually love, when it comes time to showcase that work you will hate it with such vindictive passion you’ll be doing well not to give yourself a stroke. It’s important at this point to resist the desire to douse everything you’ve made with flammable liquids, throw a match in the centre and dance a jig on the ashes. That will definitely set your art show back by at least another year.
Once you have your body of art in a safe place where you cannot destroy it, the next step is finding a gallery space. I’ve had shows in everything from suburban garages to department stores in Japan to inner city gay nightclubs and all of them were fun for different reasons. If you can’t find a gallery to showcase your art simply invent your own space. I had a mate do an art show in a beachside car park out of the back of his panel van and the art he was selling was just old clothes he didn’t want anymore. He made $40 which considering his overheads was a profit of $40. You can’t argue with that.
You have your art and you have your space but to really give your art show some clout you need to give it a name. The title you come up with should encapsulate the theme of your show communicating exactly what it is that you are trying to say about life, love, rejection, youth, pain, darkness, or the ever increasing access the government men have to your every movement through the monitoring of your smart phone. I’m not gonna lie, coming up with titles is extremely hard and for my most recent show I simply borrowed a title my friend screamed out of the window when he saw a couple of kids getting a ticket for skateboarding in a no skate zone. “DO YOGA AND THROW BRICKS AT COPS!” which pretty much summed up where I’m at with my art nicely.
Finally, you cannot have an art show without having an opening night. This is where you get all your celebrity friends like Eli Faen, who was one of the wild children in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and you get drunk and let people tell you how good you are at art before drinking all your free beer and leaving without buying anything. When the show finally comes to an end a few weeks later, that’s when you can set everything on fire so you don’t have to carry any of that awful shit home.