This afternoon I braved the rain and got a soaking heading for the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park. As with Volkswagen advertising I take exception to the use of the word "affordable" here. It's not really an Art Fair's place to tell me what I can and can't afford. The banner boasted that all the art would be under £2500. I think there are a lot of people who can't afford to spend £2500 on a picture. You might argue that just because £2499.99 was the top price, that doesn't mean that some things there would be cheaper and thus affordable. But even if some of the art had been 1p then there are some people who still wouldn't have been able to spare that money for art, because they needed to spend it on food. Anyway, there wasn't anything for 1p. £250 seemed to be about the cheapest price I could find and that was for something really tiny (and rubbish). I think "Under £2500 Art Fair - You decide if you can afford it or not" may have been a more accurate title for the event.
Actually, although most of the most expensive items were cleverly priced at £2495, I did notice a few pieces that were selling for £2500. I wondered if I should inform the authorities about the dealers who were so flagrantly breaking the code of the event. £2500 is not under £2500, being as it is £2500. I let it go. I can't afford to pay £2500, even if I am going to get a statue of a naked woman with a dog's head for that price. Actually this is unfair, the naked dog headed woman was £2495 and thus well within the rules, but there were four of them, which meant that if you bought the set you'd be spending almost £10,000. Which is almost as unaffordable as one of VW's affordable cars. I did point out to my friend that the naked dog women were not even properly naked as they were all wearing pants. If I am going to buy a naked dog-headed woman for £2495 then I want it to be properly naked. Even if the pants did not leave much to the imagination, I still expect full nudity for that price. I contended that I could afford to buy an actual real naked dog-headed woman for £2495, not just a statue, but my companion was having none of it. Maybe she was right, but in 20 years time when cloning and species splicing technology has advanced, naked dog-headed women will be ten a penny (literally) and so whoever paid £2495 for a mere statue of a naked dog-headed woman that still has pants on is going to look pretty stupid.
My companion thought I was bringing the tone of the event down and that I was missing the point of the naked dog-headed women and could I stop talking about them because people were starting to look. She was just jealous because I'd inadvertently let it slip that I'd prefer to be spending my afternoon with a woman with a dog's head. Not one with a boring old human head like she had. But there wasn't a man in the room who would have felt any differently.
