The explosive growth of the art world over the last decade has been fueled by rich new collectors, shiny new galleries and sprawling new museum wings. The gears and the grease that keep this big machine humming are people who can be generally described with less glamorous phrases: underpaid, uninsured, overworked and sweaty (not to mention, often heavily tattooed, bearded, hung over and burdened by loan payments for their M.F.A. degrees).
These are the art handlers, an often-invisible international underclass of blue-collar workers, most of them aspiring artists trying to pay the bills. But on Sunday afternoon at a bare-bones gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a group of them finally got a chance to grab a little glory. And even better, they got a raucous public forum in which to mock gallery owners, curators, collectors, artists, critics and just about everyone in the art world, not excluding themselves.
The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics – a combination roast, Jackass-style stunt extravaganza and beer fest – drew a crowd of about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head to head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of bubble wrap.
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