the woe of an emerging artist

So the way see is it is probably the way that everyone else who has just graduated sees it.
Here am I armed with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and now I ask myself the biggest question I have ever asked myself... or perhaps the only big question I have ever asked myself... WHAT NOW?
All day life seems to be revolving around finding gigs or finding employment or working for free because eventually it will benefit you (because you have nothing better to do anyways?). Is there a job I'm qualified for other than the Paper Source, who never called me back so maybe, oh just maybe woeful art majors... maybe we're not even qualified for that? Oh and then of course I want to apply to shows and be a legit artist... what a struggle!
Good jobs, bad jobs, in between jobs. Coffee jobs and paper jobs and teaching jobs and gallery jobs OH MY! Suddenly art is no longer a paintbrush but a cover letter. Your back up job at Building 19 is actually a hard job to get.

I know this is probably the time in my life where I whine about having been a painting major, but I suppose it's only been a few weeks. I still don't regret it, I just miss painting and it's hard to paint when you should be looking for a job, but if you're looking for a job you should be painting?

Dearest artists... we have it worst than regular people. I don't know about you guys but when it says "knowledge of Microsoft Office" all i can think to myself is that I never could make those little cells look right in Microsoft Excel!

Let's toast to someday..... somehow... making our little cells look okay in Microsoft Office and finding a decent job so that when we are done with the Excel worksheet we can back home to our paintbrushes and become famous! You have a fan in me.

In other news I found the most amazing artist today! Brian Jungen- Who I will talk about next time... New hope for modern art!

I just needed to get this off my chest of course

Clown Art and Disco Sushi Gallery: Don't be fooled! Let's pretend we're a gallery but we're really mentally incompetent!

So I suppose art student life goes like this: Art Student gets into art school (yay), Goes to art school and paints a shit ton of paintings (or paints a ton of shit, whichever way you look at it). Said student (myself) graduates from said art school (yay!) and realizes they are pretty much only qualified to work at pizza hut (and I was really hoping to look good in that bikini by the end of the summer). So in the midst of deep post graduation depression one starts looking around at all the wonderful shows they can get into. Pretending in my mind that I was a hip NYC artist and wondering what my fellow imaginary (or real) NYC art friends were up to I decided to peruse CL while going on my typical hunt for jobs, cheap art supplies and mannequin bodies. So much to my initial surprise and glee they had a lot of ads up for shows, something you don't find too much in Boston so I figured that it seemed like a quick easy thing to try. So I applied to one show saying they did "pop up gallery" shows, which I read as "oh we go off and find really cool spaces to hang shows" , and they called themselves the "intermix" gallery. They are mixing taking your money, making your art look like crap so they can say they have hip "art" on the walls. I got accepted to this show and I thought to myself awesome how easy... but then I kept reading... and THEN I looked at pictures. This was a one night event "registration" cost 100$. For one night? What am I paying for again? Oh I get free cover! For a hundred dollars! My guest list is free too you say? So basically it's a deal if you want to 10 people to this thing but want to get in for cheap, but of course this is also a way to get 10 extra people into the club... and of course these 1o people will be getting drunk too. Seems like win win for them and lose lose for the artist. I googled the intermix gallery and couldn't even find anything, but just like the email said, Ashton Kutcher hangs out here... is my art paying for his VIP room. I'll have my blogging public know that I don't even like Ashton Kutcher. He's almost as obnoxious as this place is!

I don't know how I can even react to the pictures except that it looks garish at best. I mean bright yellow walls, I feel like someone is going to knock over somebody's artwork and the art looks like crap! Of course they want you to do this show! I saw in later posts that they were looking for "art and fashion" themed things... but they didn't say that in the post I responded to. So basically most of the time they are just too lazy to even tell you what they are ideally looking for because they want to make sure to get the most number of dumb artists they can rip off. NO one is going to buy from this "gallery".

And then we come to my next unfortunate email courting another "gallery". This place said that it was a "sushi bar", "gallery" and "lounge" and when a place says "gallery" I really like to think a great big white room with lots of wall space. Nope... I was wrong. Obviously I am mostly to blame you send someone a link to your work on CL and you can't expect any miracles, but I'm a common emerging artist letting my adoring public now that I may be a moron but these people are insane. Anyways, in my lovely email correspondance with "Mike A" from "Avenue A Art Gallery" he asks me simply "Will You be in NYC". Well dumbass I don't think I would have replied to the post if I had no intention of going to New York, he didn't tell me when, how many times or for how long. I must be psychic! I told him I could make it down there, to which he replies "OK your in 1 piece". Does anyone not his improper grammar usage as well? Of course now I get a link telling me what's going on! They don't charge anything and they don't take any part of your sales, which is nice, and I was thinking that it might be worth going down to NYC a few times this week if I could potentially sell a piece. Of course funny thing happened when I tried to google "Avenue A art gallery" nothing came up! WHY? because it's a sushi bar! He's having a "show" but hasn't given any consideration to what ar t is actually going to be there and plans on lighting my masterpiece with a disco ball. From what I could find from the sushi bar is that it used to be a nice joint (Maybe the art shows weren't shady, but they probably still were!). On yelp they talk about how the place has "a lot of random art on the walls, and you can buy it". Hmm sounds like the Boloco I went to the other day had art on the walls... and I could buy it... and it wasn't illuminated by a disco ball but they don't call themselves a "gallery". Well "Mike A" and his creepy illustrations that he so graciously linked me to, you can cross my name off of your "show" and I can save the 60 dollars worth of bus tickets I'd have to buy to participate in showing my art under disco light and coming home smelling of raw fish and NYU students vomit from too much cheap sake, I'll save that money and I'll put that towards a juried show like my Senior Seminar teacher told me to.

Disco Art Sushi Carnival!

Now I want to vomit... but we'll leave that to the NYU kids for the artists who are dumb enough to show in these shady establishments!