This insider peek into the art of turning a vernissage into your own debut is so delightfully instructive I am presenting it here as a separate post:

[Headings in bold for scanning/skipping.]

The name "Vernissage", by the way, derives from french vernis = varnish (emaille to protect oil paintings).
Ergo, there will be fresh varnished images to view. That indicates that a) the artist is still alive and b) he accomlished it in the last instant.

The clothes:
To the fashionable intellectual applies: there are only two colours: black and pied. Colourful are already the paintings, so there is black left for you. Men therefore wear: turtle neck - idealistically combined with jeans and a secondhand sack coat.
Women wrap themselves into black snug dresses. But: no costume, never. On such events, costumes are only wore by those dames who provide the guests with beverages, or work at the enterprise that subsidize the whole magic, often both is accurate. Prove piety: do not approach them about it. The black you skillfully break with about 35qm of pied cloth whom you airily throw around your shoulders. The cloth should preferably be batiqued in a feministical Indio collective, or you take a carpet from IKEA, that works, too.
Do you smoke? The consumption of tabac is a popular burden in intellectual circles since the gusto of absinth became slightly out of date. To this occasion, you therefore take along some parcel of Gauloises respectively Gitanes, thus you prove your bohemian way of life. If you donīt smoke, start with it.

Your appearance:
Donīt ever arrive too soon, otherwise you stand too far ahead and are later the last at the buffet. But donīt arrive more than 30 minutes after the official begin, maybe the artist himself says a couple of words, and you have the chance to learn his name, at least. That can be of use later, if necessary note it on the back of your left hand (best is on the first limb of your thumb).

Why the left thumb? Later in the evening you will have a glass of sparkling wine in your hand which the sophisticated dazzler wears in his left hand to grasp hands respectively food with his right. This way the writing is always at sight.

During the evening:
Grant that everyone who is as dressed as you has as much knowledge as you have. You recall: a woman in costume belongs to the catering, a man with tie is a philistine.
Coolness is on the agenda: You know everything, have seen everything, are bored. To that applies even if you when entering the hall are dashed with a bucket of porcine blood.
If you have any problems with the sexual orientation of your fellows, forget about them for the duration of the event.

All artists are homo- or heterosexual, often both.
The artist himself is a figure of light that lowers itself to the disdainful audience. Most sell their grandmother for a glass of wine and have already survived more drug and sex experiments than RTL II could show on a weekend, that they claim at least. As a matter of fact, most of them live in small suburbs in building and loan houses and worry that their daughter can attend a decent school without much adolescent deliquency (smoking, smooching etc). Genuine bohemians are extinct, todayīs artists lack of encyms for this style of life.
The really iridescent natures of the scene are gallerists these days. "Gallery", by the way, derives from "galley": downstairs there is rowing, on top there is drumming. The artist does the work, the gallerists do the money.

Conversations:
Policy: Nobody knows anything about art, except he has studied history of arts. Nobody understands art, except he is an artist. Artists never study history of arts and vice versa. You understand?
The world of art is one of extremes. Best is you deny any artistīs talent. If your opponent anticipates you with that, you praise the exhibitor: Admire the originality of the oevre, the dared peinture, the classic technique (the latter in particular, if it is a matter of some nonrepresentational smudge).
Use "hyphenated vocabulary" like "geometric-cristalline", "heatlike-chaotic" or "plastic-haptic". No idea what that means? Donīt worry. Noone will contradict.
One is gladly forced into a discussion around the "term of art" by food tourists who appear at every opening of goulash soup. You forebode: "What is art, actually?".
Here there is a multitude of potential answers:
1. intellectual version: "Art is everything pictorial that shows apart from the sheer depicting-ornamental further layers of comprehension."
2. convenient version: "Art is everything that isnīt transportable anymore by a car."
3. crackerbarrel version: "Art is everything that you (your opponent) doesnīt understand anymore."
4. nihilistic version: "De facto there is no art, just entity that conveys to us the fiction of the artistical."
If someone says that something one does not understand cannot be art as well, you respond: "Just because you donīt understand "Japanese" it is - despite your ignorance - a language.".

The History of art:
Able dazzling requires marginal awareness of the subject. Therefore some basic informations:
As a matter of simplicity, art is divided into two epoches: "classic" and "modern". "Classic" is the case if the painting could be substituted by a well-put fotograph, the rest we describe as "modern". Modern can be all sorts of things, from the atmospheric artworks of the early impressionism to the minimalistical canvas abuses with two lines of charcoal on 4qm.

posted by Jessica at 10:48 PM

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