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rfmcdonaldLast Tuesday, the Power Ball XVII fundraising party was held at waterfront Toronto art complex The Power Plant. I had heard of it, but did not go. Why would I? How would I even have a chance of attending?
In a devastating essay at Canadian Art Rosie Prata examines, with no small amount of scholarship and wit and incredulity, this event. She describes Power Ball XVII as a place hardly devoted at all to the art that it is supposed to sponsor, it being an event much more dedicated to an indulgent decadence blind to its own flaws that evokes pre-1789 Parisian soirées.
Read it all.
In a devastating essay at Canadian Art Rosie Prata examines, with no small amount of scholarship and wit and incredulity, this event. She describes Power Ball XVII as a place hardly devoted at all to the art that it is supposed to sponsor, it being an event much more dedicated to an indulgent decadence blind to its own flaws that evokes pre-1789 Parisian soirées.
In the opening scene of Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, the main character celebrates the signing of a lucrative book deal by dining on bluefin and baby octopus that have been “massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease.” Stunned as to why he’s been given such a generous sum, and empathically disturbed by the absurd decadence of gorging on creatures so intelligent that they decorate their own dwellings, he mentally calculates that the six figures he’s been given amount to “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”
I entered the performance space of Jennifer Rubell’s So Sorry, the main event at this year’s Power Ball—the Power Plant’s annual gala fundraiser and hot-ticket art-society event—wearing the sample-sale designer dress I’ve worn to the last four upscale events I’ve gone to. I thought of Lerner’s protagonist, not least because of the resplendent cephalopod chandelier hanging in the centre of the room. This year’s theme was “Appetite for Excess,” and a Bacchanalian feast was underway at various food stations. Everything was literally stacked: enormous loaves of rustic sourdough, an oozing pile of golden honeycomb next to wheels of sharp cheese, an altar of roasted asparagus spears, a sticky choux-pastry Tower of Babel construction, hip-height drawers of herbed new potatoes and spits of caramelized ham hock installed into alcoves in the wall.
Near the centre of the room, a crowd gathered around a long white table with fist-size holes cut into it. A peek through the holes revealed a busy kitchen assembly line set up with prep stations and an expediter directing the show. I was eerily reminded of Santiago Sierra’s Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (1996–98), but saw faces smiling as workers interacted with guests. A never-ending procession of protruding hands offered delicious morsels of finger food: cured meats, fried chicken, sausage rolls, leafy radishes and bocconcini balls draped with slivers of oily fish and a smattering of allium blossoms. I helped myself to at least three of the latter. It was a luxuriant display of overindulgence, reminiscent of Marina Abramović’s controversial art direction at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2011 gala, and party guests blissfully lapped it up.
Read it all.
