750 Dollars

This past weekend I had the opportunity to see a small art exhibit. It's not something a large amount of people would typically visit, it was in the entry hall of an auditorium at a college. People from the Continuing Education classes, I believe, made some art and thought they would turn a small profit from their ventures and display their work together in this location. Maybe I'm a harsh critic, maybe I'm a little too poor for artwork, maybe every last person there thought a bit too highly of their art. I think it's the last one.

My wife had a thing she had to attend to learn about what she needs to get that second degree in education. I was board out of my skull, after all, I didn't fit into this crowd because I had no desire to follow their footsteps down that path to Education degree, at least not yet. So seeing upon entering the building all the artwork hung upon those metal grids I thought I'd leave my wife's side and walk around those carefully crafted mediums and judge them for myself.

At first I looked at the artwork. And this is before I picked up the pamphlet to found out that it was Continuing education. I figured that some of these people were getting their feet wet in a new medium and these displays amounted to a selection of works from various classes. After walking around and not paying too much attention I decided to focus a little more on what I was looking at. I returned to what I thought was the worst piece there and studied it to see why my gut told me this.

It was a pencil drawing with poor shading for the central figure and the background of the image was just scribbles it seemed like, as if the person no longer wanted to work on the image. I looked down at the name, the title of the piece, some entry number and the price. I almost ripped down the piece to get a real close look at it and march off to find the person responsible. The piece was 700 dollars. I wondered if perhaps this was some kind of odd joke, since art students can be known for that sort of thing.

I quickly started checking prices around the exhibit, $300, $700, $750, and a couple up to $1200. This $700 pencil sketch/shading was no joke. I now really started to look these things over and I found that one , the only one, piece of assemblage was $45. Not that I would pay even that price for the assemblage piece, but I felt it deserved a higher mark than that. In the whole exhibit I saw only two pieces that seemed to be communicating something almost worth the amount tacked onto it.

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