Flaneur Have you got a link? No idea who blind boy is but I like stuff like that. I appreciate art, I’m not down on artists at all. It’s the obscene amounts of money people will pay for some of it.
My first day on the job on Park Ave me and the other handyman, an old Irish bloke who was a total cunt but could also be funny, we were running the freight elevator at the back of the building, one of the tenants was lending some of her paintings to a gallery in Boston, the art movers were in crating it all up. We brought them down with one crate which I leant on. One of the art movers (think the judgemental records shop worker who sneers at your selections) said to me, ‘I hope you’re rich that’s a Rothko insured for $6m you’re leaning on.’ Quick as a flash the old handyman slammed his hand down on the crate and said, ‘You said it’s insured, right?’
What bothered me, and has always bothered, me about this is the woman who owned the paintings lived alone in a massive two storey apartment which she only remained in for the wall space for her art. The Rothko was one of many. On my way to work that morning I’d walked past a queue outside a soup kitchen in the church a block from the apartment building I was now working in. Now I know for a fact that lady was phenomenally generous towards charities and donated heavily to the soup kitchen but I still don’t know how you can walk your dog past scores of homeless people day in day out, come home and not look at one of your $6m paintings and not think you could maybe do more, that you haven’t got your priorities mixed up a bit. Maybe it’s just me?
So if there’s ever an art heist and no one has been hurt, or a forgery that’s slipped through and gone for millions you can be sure I’m cheering the bad guys on.