We were contacted a while back and asked if we would like to read Wendy Holden’s latest book Gallery Girl. We were also offered the chance to chat to Wendy or get her to write us a guest post. Because of the hectic-ness of the past two weeks we settled on a guest post and here Wendy discusses her new book and tells us why she decided to base it around the ‘Cinderella’ fairy tale.

Gallery Girl is indeed a sort of Cinderella story in that the put-upon heroine eventually triumphs, and it contains some fabulously Ugly Sisters in the persons of ruthless gallery owner Angelica and competitive nympho art collector Fuchsia Klumpp. First and foremost, however, it’s a comedy.

The books I most like to write are behind-the-scenes looks at wealthy, glittering worlds, but they also have to be funny. It seems to me that there is innate humour in the very state of being glamorous, rich and famous, because it takes such effort to maintain the façade. Opportunities to come a cropper and reveal the gap between appearance and reality are rife. And it’s these gaps that we’re all most interested in.

So I am always looking for potential worlds to conquer in this respect, and contemporary art was a perfect one. There’s so much money and fame involved, and the actual artwork is frequently so hilarious. Earlier this year, at the international contemporary art fair the Venice Biennale, I stood in disbelief in front of some black rubber flags, a stuffed cat on top of an unfinished IKEA cabinet, some framed knickers and a ‘corpse’ face down in a swimming pool. All masterpieces, apparently.

So Gallery Girl was a great opportunity for me to give full expression to the fantastic comic potential of this sort of art, about which everyone has an opinion and which in my view is made all the funnier by the extraordinarily po-faced stance of most of its perpetrators and defenders.

Alice, my heroine, is a nice girl who likes proper paintings but nonetheless ends up as assistant in the OneSquared Gallery, a showcase of contemporary art craziness featuring heads made of frozen wee, gold-sprayed wheelchairs and hairy pebbles.

The possible characters seemed endless -– the nude model, the showman auctioneer, the publicity-milking, super-rich contemporary artist versus the talented but skint traditional portrait artist, to name but a few. I could see immediately the potential for the perfect glamorous comedy. The lust, loot and lunacy of the world of knickers nailed to chopping boards!

I had the background, too. I have always been interested in art, I used to work on an art magazine and I even had a flourishing career as a cartoonist once, drawing for Vogue and the Independent. Now I collect, although not on the Fuchsia scale! And the more I researched and wrote Gallery Girl, the more I itched to make a spoof contemporary art exhibition myself. It was a small step from this to adopting the persona of Zeb Spaw, the bigheaded bad-boy artist who is the villain of Gallery Girl, and creating an entire exhibition, angry_with_britain.

angry_with_britain pulls together a number of contemporary artworks in Zeb’s own inimitable style. ‘Fifteen Metres Of Fame’ is Spaw’s homage to Warhol; a fifteen-metre rope hung with pictures of celebrities mounted on cardboard (mostly from All Bran boxes). ‘Tripetych’ is three panels featuring blown-up images of offal. Sculptures include ‘Flash In The Pan’ – a gold-sprayed loo - ‘The Death of Rock and Roll’ and the harrowing ‘Iraq’. There’s also ‘Hunter Gatherer’ - shopping lists found abandoned in baskets in the local supermarket and framed in rows of four. ‘Stigmata’ – a questioning piece featuring gold-sprayed gardening gloves - and ‘Pants’, the inexpressible loneliness of the human condition as shown through a pair of large white Y-fronts.

All in all, writing Gallery Girl was certainly the most fun I’ve ever had working on a book, which I hope comes out in the novel! Gallery Girl’s available from every good bookshop and you can catch my/Zeb’s exhibition, angry_with_britain indefinitely on my website, www.wendyholden.net.

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