The Pictures: The catalogue for “First Night”, Polygon Gallery’s annual auction and first night they allowed members of the (high-paying) public into the gallery.

More talks with the curators…

The Polygon had an auction recently, as they’ve done when they used to be Presentation House as well. Preparations for the auction also added to the general busyness of everybody in the office, organizing things, getting the above catalogue ready, etc. Luckily I was able to take a copy of the auction catalogue with me (circumventing the purchase of a $500 ticket). I had a little chat about the auction with one of the curators; I asked where the funds for the auction were going to afterwards and was told it was to their capital campaign (and to the artists too), their collection of funds to be used to help pay for their new space. I guess non-profits do have to run events like this (since they aren’t generating profit from admissions and whatnot); they do need money to run; though maybe my concern with this is the exclusivity (again, $500 for a ticket as I saw on the website), but also of course the price of the art as seen in the catalogue. This was all another reminder of the large amounts of money, the economic, market forces, that are an undercurrent of the art world (whether we like to think about it or not), forces that confer ‘value’. As seen in my pictures above, we have works by Marian Penner Bancroft and Rodney Graham, both Vancouver-based artists. The images may be too small, but Bancroft’s work starts at–according to market forces as the curator tells me–$5000, while Graham’s begins at $220,000! Out of the two, Graham is the much more internationally renowned artist, owned by several international galleries, which is why his work is worth way, way more. Go figure.  The auction was a great success though.

Another conversation I had with the same curator began with some social media problems. Sitting near the curator’s office (as I had found my usual space had been taken over by a computer), I overheard and conversation she was having with another staff member along the lines of advertising, through social media, a talk about archives. At the moment I was just acting as an aural voyeur–whatta term–but the staff member came out and tapped me and patted me on the shoulder, saying “Well, you’ve got a writer here” (I think the curator would’ve just asked my supervisor–the curatorial assistant–usually, but he was doing something at the Toronto Art Fair that day). So I got drafted into service, not that I wasn’t glad to help out with something else. Basically, the curator just needed help sifting through a long abstract sent by a curator they asked to come and give a talk during the new exhibition. The curator asked if I had written a press release before and I said no, but that’d I’d take a look at it. My idea of dealing with this was just to summarize the most important points of the abstract, to isolate the most attractive and ‘punchy’ bits, especially sentences that included such academic buzzwords as “systemic violence” or “trauma” (not to trivialize what these words mean of course, but I was told to keep in mind people like me, fellow undergraduate and graduate students, as the potential audience). So I both summarized and lifted certain choice sentences. I’ve had a bit of experience with this kind of stuff; it’s similar to the  Luckily once I sent my draft back to the curator, she said that it was just what she was looking for. We then talked a lot about the event itself. The event is inviting a curator who is interested in looking at the overlooked aspects of Iranian history. He was invited partly because of North Vancouver’s large Iranian population (something I was unaware about before doing research at the Polygon). We discussed how does one define a ‘successful’ event (large attendance numbers?), who to target and invite as potential audience members–the visiting curator actually was against inviting members of the immigrant Iranian public, because of how they apparently tend to romanticize the homeland and may be adverse to talking about aspects of their history they fled from (the Iranian Revolution for example). We also discussed the problem of geographic areas, labels like, for example, “Asian” compared to “South Asian” compared to “East Asian”–where do these boundaries begin and end?

Again, more interesting conversation and what-goes-on-in-curators’-heads.