I had a dream that I was in Baltimore at an auction of works by Borna.
it consisted of two main things:
the first where he had painted the front of a baltimore row house white, and then had somehow very seamlessly projected various red hues onto it, thus in photographs (taken at night) it looked as if he had painted it very carefully, slightly different shades, over and over.
there was also a crazy black and white video that was like a weird cut up of remakes of scenes from old 40s and 50s movies where Borna had somehow cast very famous contemporary actors (tom hanks, Don’s wife on Mad Men) to re-enact these old scenes, but do it all wacky, like Buster Keaton style, with stupid fake moustaches, etc… mixed in with weird computer-generated geometric pattern stuff that was also processed to look exactly like it fit in with the original videos.
so the auction gets underway and there’s a lot of excitement because there are a few families there, notably one filled with older black women, who are big supporters of Borna’s work and its expected that these pieces are gonna go for a pretty big price. The bidding goes back and forth and is going really high (notably the auctioneer says “fourteen hundred thousand, fifteen hundred thousand” which seems like a weird way to say 1.5 million?) The work hangs at ‘sixteen hundred thousand’ until the guy sitting next to me, a clueless looking young blonde French guy who I’ve been chatting with, gets out a piece of paper to write a bid down on and show to the auctioneer. At first he gets it wrong and puts $1,599,999, the he re-writes it to $1,600,001, and then he wins the bid. Ebay style tactics. Everyone is all bummed because somehow they all know he works for some corporate entity, so Borna will not be getting the local support. The auctioneer asks the guy and he says that he works for Northwest Airlines, as their art buyer.
I asked him how he got into that (sounds like a cool job) and he starts to go on and on about his double masters and PhDs in art history and blah blah blah and he’s clearly more into himself than Borna or the work so I stop paying attention.
