Gallery NightIt’s Gallery Night in Ithaca, NY.
The art crowd is out in this appalling weather. It’s so cold in this fucking small upstate ice capital that the city fathers and mothers have banned temperature readings on the Commons clock displays. No bad news gets past their vigilance. You could commit a triple homicide, dismember your victims, wrap the parts in sections of the Ithaca Journal and stick the parts in newspaper coin boxes without the news ever being reported in the morning edition. Bad for business. People will stay away, spend more of their disposable ncome in big box stores. Ezra digresses. We’re talking about what passes for art in Ithaca. A celebration of the Yankee aesthetic.
Where all the landscapes are pleasant. Like picture postcards. Ithaca is gorges. Don’t forget it. So people occasionally fall from one of those gorges. Mostly Japanese graduate students who have flunked out of Cornell and can’t find a hari kari kit at Wal-mart. Ezra digresses again. He is obsessed with Pacific Rim people infiltrating his community, competing with him for the top jobs at Wegmanns, buying up all the natural food groceries, filming remakes of Godzilla in Fall Creek and forcing all the residents of Ithaca to dress like Astro-boy.
That’s all Ithaca artists paint. Gorges. Ithaca Falls seen from the north wall at sunset under the influence of three cocktails consumed at Simeon’s in the company of fellow Cornell graduates who have all managed to have Ithaca Art Walk signs erected in front of their Fall Creek Yankee cottages. Or Ithaca Falls seen from the south side a half hour after Gimme Coffee opened. Or the visionary view of Ithaca Falls seen from the space shuttle Atlantis just as it is about to crash into Home Depot on the Elmira Road. That earned the artist a 90 day pass to the pscyh unit at Cayuga Medical Center.
Presiding over Gallery Nights is the Queen Prune of the Ithaca Art World. Barbara Hopkins. Barbara is the czarina of the Community School of Music and Art. CSMA. It doesn’t matter that Barb resembles a cross between Josef Stalin in drag and Grandma Moses a second after she passed menopause. She has outlasted all other competitions for the top art job in Ithaca, attended more mind numbingly boring committee meetings, smoozed with more people who knew Robert Motherwell when he was in a nursing home, bought more local art and stuffed it into her living room, owns more paintings of gorges than anyone else in Ithaca. More on the Ithaca art scene in the next blog. Have a piece of chocolate.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:28 PM
