Vignettes #42

(Dale Malner)

I'm acquainted but not friends with a successful local artist, in fact I already knew him before he decided to become an artist. He is quite a self-righteous and scheming person, and over the last 2 decades he has managed to have been at war with nearly everyone in the arts scene and achieved that his work got good prices with local banks, companies and the city administration.

His works are rather unremarkable, a harmless form of neo-expressionism, the kind of abstract art the uninformed will rate as acceptable.

One evening at a dinner party at my parents' place I met a CEO of a large city corporation who was on close terms with this artist, so inevitably we came to talk about him. I expressed my opinion about this artist quite sharply and said that it is quite awkward how he's selling his work to big business. How can an artist create anything discerning or critical since he'd need to avoid offending these buyers?

"Oh, he is very much aware of that", the CEO explained. "He distinguishes between the work he sells to those businesses and his 'real' art which he keeps for his more prestigious exhibitions."