- Andy Warhol
I used to work in an art gallery in La Jolla, California—a ritzy little ocean enclave just north of San Diego. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Porsche. There were no stores, only boutiques, and none of them seemed to sell anything that cost less than $300. La Jolla is littered with luxury in the way that liquor stores overrun areas of urban blight. That’s something you’d think would bode well for an art gallery. Anyone blithely carrying a dog the size of a squirrel in a bag that cost more than my car has money to spend on art, right?
Crickets.
Actually I wish there had been crickets. I could’ve used the company—and their chirping would’ve been a welcome break from the silence. As it was, my closest confidant at the gallery was the scanner. The two of us worked hand-in-hand, if you’ll pardon the phrase, creating images and sending them off to faceless clients—or, more often, to the faceless assistants of faceless clients. Then we’d wait, breath bated, for the e-mail relaying if the boss of the assistant had liked the image of the artwork that we’d sent. It was like selling art in Plato’s cave.