I went to the Beverly Hills Affaire in the Garden today. I was the judge for the Painting exhibits. The event is held twice a year in the Beverly Gardens Park in Downtown Beverly Hills, four blocks strong of artists in booths and food vendors.
The art is not exactly “cutting edge” by any stretch, but they make an effort to not allow cheesy things like giclee prints, so you get only stuff that someone works at. Quite a bit of it is craft in my estimation, not art, but maybe I am an art snob, right?
So anyway, there were fifty or so painting booths and I got there early and got the paperwork, the ballot and went about looking. It was easy to mark off the artists whose work held no appeal to me on an aesthetic level. There is a screening process to get into the event so I felt that I did not need to be open-minded to painting styles that I do not like. I looked, but it was a fait accompli for many painting displays. Every once in a while I would find something that was at least some combination of an approach to painting that I liked and a well-done artwork. Okay, those got a return trip. I had to pick a best-of-show, a 2nd, 3rd place and two Honorable mentions. There were some cash prizes for the artists, too.
Hopefully the prominent award ribbons assist the artists I liked in selling their paintings. Fortunately, a few of my friends were exhibiting, but in different categories, so there was no conflict there. My neighbor James Hill was setting up his sculpture booth early and I walked by and offered to get him a coffee. When I returned ten minutes later he had already sold a steel modernist piece. A four-figure art sale before the first sip of coffee is a pretty good way to start the day!
So yeah, during the day a few times I thought of the old punk song Beverly Hills/Century City/Everyone is nice and pretty/All the people look the same/don’t they know they’re so damn lame, but other than people having matching dogs (very weird trend, and prevalent among event-goers in an almost science fiction manner) it was kind of an ecelctic crowd. Rich, but eclectic.