How to go to a gallery opening: BTYB Real Detroit

On the cover of this week’s Real Detroit: a five-point beginner’s guide for attending gallery openings entitled “Free Booze, Expensive Art.”

There was a folk saying, back in Milwaukee, during the brief and wondrous life of the Armoury Gallery, about attending art openings. It went something like, “it’s not an opening until Amy Elliott spills a glass of red wine all over the goddamn place.”

So this cover of RDW — it resonates with me.

My first reaction to this story was “morons” — but of course that’s unfair, especially coming from me, a shy person who worries often about decorum and social expectations. Galleries can be intimidating spaces, populated by intimidating people, and of course I’ve been the lady at the art opening casting unsure glances at those bottles of two-buck Chuck, wondering if I can go ahead and serve myself. (I’ve also been the lady wondering who to talk to after spilling two-buck Chuck on the floor, the freshly-painted walls or, I’m embarrassed to say, some art. Although I have never, unlike this cover model, tried to stealth away with a few dozen cheese cubes in my handbag.)

RDW interviews Jessica Slaven, a NY-based contributor to the Paper Monument pamphlet I like your work: art and etiquette, published in August. This little treatise explores the role of etiquette in the increasingly social world of art-creating, collecting, curating and reporting, both in practical and theoretical terms.

Here’s the problem, though: why didn’t RDW provide a next step for those of us who are ready to practice our new art gallery smarts? Say, a list of upcoming art openings in the metro Detroit area?

I guess I’ll have to get that at the Metro Times.