diy art galleries

I'm procrastinating on a few things I need to do for New Year's Eve. Clock is ticking. Argh.

So here's what I've been whining about today: yesterday I went to an art gallery in a city closeby. The building was big and beautiful, and it had all the trappings of a regular gallery, including a website, a flyer on the exhibits, and gallery staff. And yet...

First, my friend and I went to the bottom floor. We looked past all the framed pieces on the walls, searching for the art this gallery was supposed to contain. There was nothing else. We started to giggle in disbelief. The framed pieces looked like a bad version of the drawings and paintings I've been given by my friends' kids over the years. There were lots of portraits with disturbingly disproportionate figures, several questionable multi-media concoctions, and some other things I couldn't even identify. Wow.

We held out hope for the upstairs portion.

There were three rooms upstairs, each supposedly with its own distinct exhibit. Each room and each piece had a curator's explanation written on an 81/2 x 11 inch piece of paper, attached to the wall with that blue sticky stuff that everyone uses to hang posters when they're 19 and in a crappy rented place. Oh so professional looking (but they were typed - small mercies, I guess).

The descriptions of each exhibit talked in circles about nothing. Walking through each room, we tried desperately to understand why those pieces were chosen to hang together. The tenuous linkages became our new game show (since, strangely, we found ourselves all alone), which my friend won hands down. One room had two pieces with the same spelling error. Another had several pieces with mostly white space. The pieces in the third room seemed to have only oddity in common.

So, hey, if this place can call itself an art gallery and get listed in all kinds of tourism guides, we figure pretty much anything can. My friend and I have decided that in our next period of boredom, we should just redecorate her house, buy some flea market art, cobble together some multi-media installations using a few bottles of glue and some garbage, and write our own descriptions. Presto! We'll see if we can pull off our own art gallery.

I bet it'll rock compared to the one we just experienced. Really, shouldn't there be some kind of guidelines for this kind of thing?