Ye Olde Arte Faire

One of those other things that is a big deal in Ann Arbor, like football and the colors blue and maize, is the annual art fair in summer. This was the weekend before the Champions Cup game, but I forgot about it until after I posted about the game because soccer > art (sorry, art). During art fair, dozens of vendors from all over the country arrive to sell their wares for exposure cold, hard cash and thousands of people visit to artify their homes. Since getting to art fair involves the same bus I take weekly to get to central campus, I usually go to gauge how unaffordable everything is.

Art fair on State Street

And also to see art/people watch, but a not insignificant amount of time is spent trying to read price tags and differentiate between commas and decimal points. (Is that painting $200? $2,000? $20,000? Who knows?) Many of the streets around the Diag and in the State Street area are closed off for the weekend, allowing people to wander mostly freely. The art ranges from landscape paintings to pottery to handmade toys to furniture to giant cacti. If I ever get my own house, I might have to find a giant metal cactus for my front lawn, maybe some flamingos and garden gnomes too. I know, I have impeccable taste.

I didn’t buy anything this year (or last year) but I did enjoy looking at everything for sale. At one point I walked into the nonprofit section and was immediately accosted by five hundred people exhorting me to vote/support their political candidate/donate/take a bumper sticker/join their religion. I ignored all of them, passed through their gauntlet of pamphlets, and returned to looking at $500 ($5,000? $50,000?) sculptures and paintings. To be fair to the artists, I know art takes time, talent, and material to create. It’s expensive. Some artists even limit prints to increase the demand and value of their work. I get it; exposure doesn’t pay the bills. Some might argue being a grad student doesn’t either.

Somewhere on Main Street

Oh, well. Maybe next year the stars will align and I’ll find the trifecta of affordability, likeability, and utility. Meaning that 1) the price is on the order of weeks of groceries or less (on the order of months of rent and above is too high) (sorry, giant cactus), 2) I actually like it (sorry, purses, scarves, skinny alien people sculptures, anything that looks like you could paint it with your eyes closed, etc.¹), and 3) I can actually use or display it in my apartment (sorry again, giant cactus). My current wall decorations are prints of photos I took, a periodic table placemat, a postcard from Norway, and a lenticular card of dancing penguins if that gives you any idea of how often I find art² that meets the above criteria.

¹Disclaimer: none of these things are directly related to any particular booth at art fair, so don’t worry if you were at art fair selling purses/scarves/skinny alien people sculptures/paintings you did with your eyes closed.

²My definition of art is debatable. See: giant cactus and flamingos.