PEARLS & AMBER

DAMIEN HIRST JUST LOVES THOSE DEAD ANIMALS

It's happened to me again.  I don't know how I let these things get by me--

Damien Hirst just sold every last thing he has ever even thought about making, and I wasn't there.

Last year I missed out snapping up that ancient skull (yes, a real, human skull, otherwise how could Damien have called it art?), covered with all those very real diamonds.  That skull would have shone next to the Christmas tree.  I placated my sadness by buying rhinestones (from flea markets for that touch of artiness, right Damien?  Keep it honest, right?).  I bought tubs of glue, and voila, my very own Damien Hirst.

But now, I've gone and missed out again.  Where could I have been?  Yoga class?  Eating cereal in the dining room?  Getting a speeding ticket?

I am particularly upset that I didn't get a chance to snap up that Golden Calf of his.  I mean--what's not to love?  A dead animal floating in formaldehyde.  With those 18 carat gold horns and hooves.  Oh, isn't that just so Damien?  Quel genius, right?

I am somewhat mollified that because the thing went for $18.6 million, I probably would have lost out anyway.  In these dire times, right?, I just wouldn't have felt one hundred percent spending that kind of change on a dead animal, even though I just love 18 carat gold anything.

I'm not sure where I would have put it either.  In the dining room, to spark dinner party conversation?  Out in the front yard to irritate my neighbors just for the heck of it?  Next to my bed to insure sweet dreams?  But does formaldehyde smell?  That may have been an issue.  I really prefer sweet peas next to my bed.

So anyway, Darling Damien's sale of EVERYTHING netted over 200 million dollars.  It couldn't have happened to a nicer, sweeter, more giving, altruistic man, right?

Now maybe he can go away and learn how to paint a flower or two, since he's a genius artist, right?

It just boggles my mind at what could happen to a beautiful flower in the hands of Darling Damien.

SOCCER COMES TO ART BASEL

Oh my god.  I feel the art patron's pain.

The soccer fans?  HUH?  WHADDYA SAY?  CAN'T HEAR YA-

Once a year the world's most prestigious contemporary art fair takes place in Basel, Switzerland.  I nearly had to go to eighth grade in Basel, Switzerland, so I happen to have heard of Basel.  Don't you go worrying yourself to death if you haven't.

Because the wealthiest art patrons have heard of Basel, Switzerland, and every year they positively drool at the mouth at the thought of their blissful week buying gorgeous art and looking gorgeous and feeling gorgeous and speaking in any language that might show up.  It's a very good time for wealthy art patrons. 

Until this year.

This year the Euro Cup's playoffs are being played in, yes, Basel, Switzerland, and yes, right during Art Basel week.  This is not a good thing...for the art patrons.

There will 55,000 art patrons, wearing handsome clothes and delicate psyches.  There will be 160,000 insane, rabble rousing soccer fans thinking they own the place.

Can you see it? 

I can.  Last year I was in Paris when the final rugby playoffs were occurring.  It was terribly terribly awful.  All those drunk maniacs pushing their way into my nice genteel little tourist life there in the City of Lights.  They took over the metros.  They camped on the bridges.  They traveled in large packs shouting in the streets until all hours, I tell you.  It was ghastly.  The only time it was quiet was in the morning when the rugby fans were too hungover to move.  Then the place, and I'm referring to the Left Bank, amidst all those art galleries and Dior stores and such, stank of beer and...well, never mind...except to say the dogs, even tethered to their Parisian leashes, LOVED it.

Insanely rich art patrons are feral people too, of course.  But at least they are quiet about it.  They don't take over the metro.  And, when passed out finally, they are extracted from the gold ice bucket, driven back to their hotel where they are dumped quietly into their beds, by the chauffeur.  What's not to prefer.

Sports fanatics.  Art snobs.  Together at last.   

One of each milieu will meet, one drunk on good beer, the other on good champagne.  They will fall in love, one wearing their race hat and soccer shoes, the other clad in minimal Jill Sanders.  And they will live happily ever after--

In Basel, Switzerland, that wondrous place that threw these two unlikely souls together, and said--

See?  It's all good.