Art: Sold!

There was an uncanny echo of the two-weekends-ago Erotic Art Festival at last weekend's Artist Trust auction--the Consolidated Works gallery packed with people, with tons of art hung salon-style on the walls--except that everyone was clothed. And as far as I could tell, it was an entirely different crowd. This is the real foundation of the arts in Seattle, the people who give money to the people who give money to artists. It's one of my favorite fundraising events of the year, even with its share of slightly cheesy rhetoric (the auctioneer kept talking about feeling "the passion in the room, the passion for art"), but whatever it takes to raise money for Artist Trust is all right by me.

The auctioneer was doing a pretty good job of revving up the crowd (a Patti Warashina sculpture went for over $3,000), although a lot of work in the silent auction went for very low prices, in many cases for the minimum bid. Getting art for bargain prices here seemed beside the point; I particularly liked a tiny Patte Loper painting of a deer in a kind of Hazmat suit (with little snowball footsies), from her series of works about what happens when animals acquire sciences, and I would have paid (theoretically, of course) a lot more than the guaranteed price assigned to it.

I had a good time, as I usually do, hanging in the back with the artists instead of up front with the collectors. You always learn something interesting. Jack Daws contributed a typically cheeky Jack Daws work, an apparently used bong made of a beer can, called Ceci N'est Pas Une Bong. Toward the end of the event, Daws learned that the sculpture had been found in the garbage and replaced on its pedestal--and had the good grace to find that hilarious.

emily@thestranger.com