A lot of the invites I got from art galleries this year should have been mailed in plain brown wrappers. I guess the one that alerted me to the phenomenon was the postcard showing Mary Ellen Croteau’s underwear. At first it looked as though Artemisia Gallery was exhibiting antique girdles and early 20th-century string bikini underpants. But it turned out Croteau had made jockstraps out of old bras.
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But sometimes, it seems, the gallery honchos tried to camouflage their lusty come-ons with high-toned words and intellectual pizzazz.
For instance, August House Studio sent a press release publicizing its fifth anniversary and the opening of “our summer landscape show and sale.” But the accompanying brochure had nary a landscape. There was a painting of showgirls; one was wearing an extremely short red backless things and a boa. Another painting depicted two very attractive people about to get it on. She was in a strapless dress giving good cleavage.
Then there was a nude blond angel with perky breasts and trim thighs kneeling beside two tulips whose reproductive structures were swollen and magnified. I wonder what the artist, Kirk Reinert, was trying to say. The PR firm hired by the Brandywine Fantasy Gallery, the site of the show, said Reinert is “committed to creating a new mythology for the 20th Century,” focusing on “characters and environments which epitomize our current values and traditions.”
