Being British, we arrived bang on five. This was unfortunately before the organiser, but we wandered in and were bought a drink by a very nice (and, of course, incredibly successful) ex-student of Haas. When the alumni president arrived she greeted us - we were pretty much the only people there - set up her little Haas stand and gave us our name badges.
It was at this point that the owner of the gallery arrived. Unfortunately no one had contacted her to see if it was OK to hold an alumni event at her gallery. As she not unfairly pointed out, it was opening night and they'd invited artists and dealers from the Bay area to look at and buy the art. Please could we take off our name badges and remove all signs that referred to the uni.
Students began flooding in, all under the impression that we were at an exclusive event. And it was exclusive, just not for us. When food arrived the gallery staff maintained that it was "for artists only" (a group even more undernourished than students), but their attempts to police this injunction unsurprisingly failed.
By the time the air-conditioning-free gallery filled to around three times its capacity and the music got so loud that you couldn't talk, which didn't particularly matter as no one could tell alumni from artists, we decided to leave. Around the corner was a sushi place whose advertising offered "art you can eat", and what better type is there than that?
"So when did you graduate from Haas?" "I've never heard of the place, would you like to buy an incredibly expensive painting?"
No art opening is complete without jazz.
Mmmm, this is more like it.
California rolls - what it's all about.
So it's been a strange few days, and even stranger that I haven't made any of it up. As Americans from other parts of the US say (with a shrug): that's California. On a related note, the longest-running urban tree-sit protest in the nation came to a sad but utterly predictable end today. Never fear, something else to campaign against will come along soon.
