Pimping iron

I popped into two good galleries today with detailed matte photocopies of the artist’s work in my rucksack. On my way to the first one, I bumped into the best man of the only art collector in my family, a mathematician banker making a killing in Moscow. (I feel like the poor relation.) Rather creepily I’d actually thought about his best man the night before, and, no, the relative does not collect the artist, preferring a kind of ice-age modernism instead. Anyway, the first gallery was showing an unusual homage to the gallerist’s late mother with a heady trawl through at least sixty years of abstract art. Not the artist’s thing really but laced nonetheless with a kind of irrefutable pedigree. The mother’s death was also commemorated in an insightful essay at the front desk, which I surprised myself by reading in its entirety. But the place to me was infused with more than one death as I knew both mother and son through a close friend of mine who died on his kitchen floor aged 46 from a brain aneurysm and who was found the following morning by his 11 year-old son. (I've been trickled back to a number of deceased friends lately.) In fact, I'd taken the lift to the two floors of the gallery thinking only of this friend when what I should have been thinking about was obtaining for the artist an exhibition. As it transpired, the artist would not have minded – she would not have minded anyway – as the gallerist was away and we know the need for a kind of continued respect for the dead, just like we know the hopelessness of leaving photocopies. As for the next carefully selected space, which was pinned like a white dress behind an orange cordon of road-works, not only was the madam of the venue absent but the aesthetic immediately grated. Besides, as she wasn't there, it seemed inappropriate to bang the drum too loudly. (It is not easy retaining a kind of tasteful allure about the artist's work at the same time as wanting people to notice it.) One of the tensions of this blog is its inherent frustration at knowing something few others at this stage know, namely the artist's work. Best to keep the powder dry with some of these gallery people, though, until the right moment. If the person you want to speak to is not there, come back when they are. Keep it personal.