My friend Ben Long (local graffiti artist) was set to tag paintings that got the "tagger" mode of destruction last night. The Wheel of Death's spinner never landed on it. On my way to the stage, he expressed his wanting to tag mine, but tough luck, I won! Anyway, after my painting won the whole damn competition, they put it up for auction starting at $450. Nobody bid. The Primary Colours crew wasn't sure what to do with it. So instead of giving the competition a big bummer of a close, I decided to walk over to the Wheel of Death and turn it around till the clicker landed on "tagger." Crowd went crazy, Ben came back up, and I'll be damned if that's not the nicest I've ever seen my name written. After that, we spiked it on the Tree of Death and the whole tree was sold at auction to Mark Ruschman, a local gallery owner. I thought it was a pretty epic ending to the night. I was up there and even though I would have been fine with my painting selling, I thought: "I've won all this money off this painting, but lets destroy it anyway." And my reasoning all comes down to this- Art vs. Art isn't about the money, or the fame from winning; it's about getting people to love art. You don't have to be a rich eccentric, or an artist yourself to feel welcome at gallery shows or other art events. Art is for everyone, and it can be fun, and you don't have to take it so seriously that you can't laugh and scream and trash a $2,500 painting. I don't want people going home saying to each other- "Man, that was a bunch of prize money!" I want them to be saying "That was an amazing event, I hope more stuff like this goes on here in Indy, because I want to be part of it."
That's why I want to be part of things like this... and it's nice to paid what artists should be paid for their talents.
