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Last night we finally delved into the Buenos Aires art scene… We went to the gallery night event where many of the art galleries in Retiro and Recoleta stay open late and serve champagne on the last Friday of every month. The event is sponsored by a number of banks and local businesses and about 30 or so galleries participate. We went there with a group of expats, mostly Americans, including a couple of Argentine Americans… We had a very nice time.
We’re not exactly in the income bracket that purchases art, certainly not in the US, but here in BA we can almost pull it off. And, hell, when there’s free champagne involved you can consider us collectors!
But, in a gallery with a lot of uninteresting crapola you’ve got to play it cool. You can’t just go barrelling towards the free champagne and then run out of there, even though that’s what you want to do. The complimentary bubbly is usually strategically placed and guarded, so one must feign interest in order to win a legitimate refill.
Your editor at times found himself enquiring the price of some monstrous canvas or another so that he could suavely replenish his glass… And we know we were not alone in this…
That said, we did come across a couple very nice works… some high quality still-lifes… an interesting surrealist piece… and some intricate landscapes… We may well count our pennies and return to one of these galleries and see if we can come away with something.
All that gallery hopping gave us quite an appetite, so around 10pm (a respectable dinner-time for Portenos) we headed over to a parrilla restaurant to add the weight of some redmeat to the artsy evening. On the way there we came across a soccer-hooligan rally that was being closely monitored by riot police. Some in our group saw this as a photo-op and posed alongside the riot police standing by… surely a keeper for the photo album…
We enjoyed a great parrilla dinner and some nice conversation. It seems to us a bit of a copout to hang out with Americans when in Argentina. But the thing about Buenos Aires is that it attracts certain kinds of Americans, the more interesting types, who can make for good company… So, while we don’t spend a lot of time around expats, we tend to have a good time when we do…
Today we visited one of the more famous areas of Buenos Aires that we hadn’t yet been to, San Telmo. We had heard mixed reviews of the place, so went to take a look for ourselves… What we found was a touristy sort of bohemian area of blocked-off streets, not super exciting, but not disappointing either.
Numerous musicians and street performers were plying their art in the streets. Some were quite good, playing a Django Reinhardt sort of fast-paced gypsy jazz…
Others were mere tourist sideshows…
The architecure was nice. Much of it reminicient of New Orleans…
I wish I had taken more pictures, but amidst the tourist hordes we wanted to look like locals… Anyway, there’ll be plenty more chances to explore San Telmo in future.
He he he… We’ve seen a number of these creative stencils. They’re actually rather tasteful graffiti, small sized, with an actual message instead of a bunch of nonsense. This is one of the better ones…
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