A Good Scolding

Ordinarily, given my usual writing style, I'd have put this at the end of the review of Eric White's opening. But I didn't want to clutter up his review with unnecessary verbiage, which is what this is. In fact I'm not sure if I should share this, except I want to give people a fair portrayal of my art world excursions.

At the opening at Sloan Fine Art last night, on my way out, I caught sight of Anna Ortt. I'd met Anna when she started working with Michael Lyons Wier at Michael's gallery. But I'd noticed early in the summer that Anna had fallen off the gallery Website as if she'd never even been there. (Which, not to get me started on a tangent, is one of the major flaws, to my mind, of the World Wide Web: It's far too easy to rewrite history. Even with sites like the Internet Archive around.) Of course there was no information as to why she'd gone or where; and since I quit Facebook I had no way of getting in touch with Anna aside from an old e-mail address on her out-of-date Website. I was curious as to what she was doing now, and why she left Lyons Wier, so instead of leaving I went back to talk to her.

I found her chatting with a guy named Eddie. His name is easy to remember because he was wearing an auto mechanic-style midnight blue shirt with his name stitched on a bright patch over his heart. (This, incidentally, made me irrationally angry: My father wore a shirt like that for years, not because he was some hipster making an ironic statement, but because he was an actual auto mechanic.) Anna graciously introduced us to each other -- she even remembered my name, which is pretty nice.

I tried to ask Anna what she was doing these days and we talked about that a little bit, but in the hopes of not getting a reputation as the blogger who reports the contents of every conversation I'm not going to go into it here. She rapidly turned the conversation towards my writing, in particular how harsh I am on this blog. And then she proceeded to scold me for being so mean to Michael Lyons Wier about the whole Art Bazaar thing.

I mean, she scolded me good. She defended Michael, saying he was there from eight in the morning until eleven at night, pointing out all the work of patching the holes in the gallery walls, and she very pointedly noted -- more than once -- that no one opens an art gallery to get rich. It's all, she said, a labor of love.

Again, I'm not going into great detail about what she said, partly because I was too off-balance to remember it all exactly, and partly because I don't want people to be afraid to talk to me for fear I'm going to transcribe everything they say. The bottom line here, the reason I'm telling you all this is, I want my readers to know I have been thoroughly chided for overreacting to Michael's Art Bazaar.

My wife and I had a heated discussion about this, too, when I told her about meeting Anna last night. The upshot seemed to be I was insane for picking on Michael so much, that the Art Bazaar was actually a good thing, and I was a bad person for writing mean things.

Re-reading what I wrote about the whole thing I'm not sure I have anything to apologize for. I honestly don't think I was all that harsh. Just cynical and cranky and dubious, which is my way. Still, while I may not feel I'm wrong enough to apologize yet, I will admit to maybe being a little nastier than I should've been. Not sure yet. Next time I'll try to tone it down a bit.