ARCO8 Contemporary Art Fair

One of our fellow elemadrid students is a Canadian artist named Tom Hopkins. Tom is in Madrid to learn some Spanish, but also because he has several paintings on display at the big International Contemporary Art Fair ("ARCO") that is currently taking place in Madrid. ARCO is a huge international annual event in the world of contemporary art, with hundreds of galleries from all over the world displaying works by their hottest new artists.

So, to support our new friend and see more great art, Alan, Welmoud, and I took the metro out to the big exposition center yesterday to see the show. Tom was able to score us free "Professional Artist Passes" so we were feeling pretty spiffy.

Here is one of Tom's paintings on display at ARCO this year. Very nice!

(http://www.tomhopkinsart.com/)

After checking out Tom's paintings, we wandered around for a bit, and I soon found myself absolutely and completely...

BORED! I wasn't liking the majority of what I was seeing. Maybe I just wasn't in an arty mood. I certainly don't know much about contemporary art, so maybe I just wasn't seeing what experienced art connoisseurs would see. But to my untrained eye, there seemed to be such an overabundance of macabre, ultra-bizarre art.


After 15 minutes of wandering, my attention shifted over to people watching, my favorite sport. Deals were being struck, exotic languages were being spoken, eccentric personalities were freely expressed... For me, the human dimension of the show held much more interest than the art on display.