Semifat Sediment

The Uptown Art Swarm.

The Uptown Art Fair has the same problem that all summer fairs have, combining two of my least favorite things: heat and crowds. (Actually, they also involve a third unfavorite thing, spending a long time looking for street parking, but I get around that one by not owning a car.) Since I now live in the dark heart of Uptown, my neighborhood has been taken over by swarms of people who shouldn’t be wearing shorts… wearing shorts. And fighting over parking spots, and drinking lemonade, and clogging the roads, and looking at art. And occasionally buying it.

I had to run some errands yesterday, so I fought my way through the pressing mob to get to the grocery store and the library, and ended up making a half-assed circuit around the tents. As I gave the merchandise a once-over (trying hard not to prejudice myself by looking at price tags), I started to wonder: what would you find if you looked at the Art Fair’s numbers over the years, at the kind of artists that display their wares and the kind of art that gets bought? Are there fewer people doing watercolor landscapes than ten or twenty years ago, and more people doing surrealist mixed-media paintings? Is the bent-wire sculpture fad over? What’s the state of photography? It’d be kind of fun to dig through the records and chart the trends in art over the years. Then I could make some really nice prints of the graphs, matte and frame them, and maybe put up a stand at next year’s fair.

August 7, 2005 7:29 PM.
Tags: 55408, art, information overload, twin cities.
Category: art.

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