Mexican artists come to Oaxaca to idle, pontificate and get lavishly drunk.  Admirers gather around them in obsequious eddies, asking hopeful questions to which the artists respond with one of two postures : an arm thrown around the asker’s shoulder in mock commiseration, or a flippant dismissal via shrug.  The artists opine in grand swoops until their words wither into slurs, they give little shakes of their heads, and their disciples scramble frantically in their notebooks to distract themselves from any hint of uncertainty.

The artists who come here, who build their elaborate but subtle and ergonomic mansions in the artists’ enclave of San Agustin Etla, or who drop down from Mexico City or elsewhere up north for a brief taller, seem to follow a similar pattern.  They are mostly men in their late fifties or older.  They are folkloric in a paradigmatic more than an individual way.  They lash at life with the lazy swipes of mythologized, tired tigers.  They bask in their status the way one of these tigers might bask in a bubble bath, simultaneously sardonic, glorious, and resigned.

There is not much, if any, criticism of these idols.  You would think with this being Mexico and all, rather revolutionary and prone to fits of upheaval, that an artist on hour three of a mumbly rant, who puncutates his uneven orations with a sudden, definitive statement along the lines of “art is beautiful” would be laughed and shouted off the stage, and his googly-eyed following would turn cynical and festive, rising up to declare that they’re through with this awestruck fawning and are heading out to dance, and take pictures of shoes or telephone wires or whatever they damn well please, thank you very much.

But no, no, this does not happen.  At the art openings, the book presentations, the movie screenings, everyone puts on their somber gaze of artistic pretention, sitting through whatever speeches or black and white films in grave contemplation with perhaps a scribble or two, formulating the most tedious, guy-with-the-beret-in-the-coffee shop philosophical dilemmas with which to busy themselves over copitas de mezcal.  There is no logic to these philosophical dilemmas, a huevo (a Mexican expression I adore meaning “forcibly, definitively.”)  Instead, the goal is to say something like, “but the camera is a bit like…a cloud, isn’t it?” and then, with a quirky half-smile, gaze off at the brightly painted wall and take a sip of potent liquor.  Your companion will respond with an, “orale, orale,” (wow, wow) and take a corresponding sip with a subtle, wry grin, and then you both will feel yourselves floating on an intellectual artistic plane high above the rest of the city’s dull trudging inhabitants.  ‘Tis glorious.

Yes, so this is what goes down here when there’s, say, the closing of a taller or the unveiling of a new exhibit at a museum.  But I’ve never seen it in such dramatic form as I did a few months ago, at the grand finale of a photography taller given by one of the Mexican Greats in photography, an Artist of Much Importance whose air magnetized everyone around him into grave nods and nervous fits of laughter.  Jorge took his taller, with the aim of getting a foot in the door of Mexico’s most important magazine of documentary photography.  He might’ve succeeded if I hadn’t sabotaged it all with my stance on laughter, which essentially amounted to telling the man he was full of shit.  Then he attempted to buy me a few cups of mezcal, we argued about the U.S government, and he failed to convince a now bitter Jorge and myself to go dancing.  The end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  It started upstairs at Comala, a bar we frequent enough that the waiters know the dog and no longer bring us menus.  The upstairs area is an L of two narrow connected rooms, which that night were lined with the recently printed photos from this artist’s workshop.  People lingered on benches and stood in tight little circles, drinking beer and mezcal.  It was your average party following your average taller with your average participants: young creatively inclined types in torn tights and exaggerated eye makeup, sultry and bored; a fresa or two several shades whiter than everyone else wearing skinny jeans and flats, middle-aged businessmen looking for some artistic outlet for their boredom; some fixtures of the local art or journalism scene doing yet another workshop; and because of the significance of the particular photographer giving this workshop, a few more important characters from the Oaxacan artist community, doing some hob-knobbing with the big shots to maintain their solid footing as Important Characters From The Oaxacan Artist Community.

There they were.  I arrived, got myself a beer, examined the photos, chatted.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  The standard cocktail party conversations about Japanese customs or Oaxacan plant life.  People eventually started to trickle away: the young hipsters to smoke pot, the artists and businessmen to take the beer-drinking to another level.   A small circle of Oaxacan insiders, the important types, and several handfuls of artists and hangers-on lingered about.  We were some of them.  Jorge was in networking-mode, and I was in tolerate-it-and-don’t-say-anything-stupid-mode.

There was more beer, chatting.  Then a clumsy collective push towards the mezcaleria next door.  “Vamos!” the star photographer would shout, with the sturdy bravado of a general, and everyone would scurry in confused circles, looking ahead, looking back, until the photographer would get swept into another conversation and we’d all end up loitering and feigning nonchalance, “what, go?  Really, when?  Where?”

This process took about fifteen minutes until by some miracle we were all gathered in front of the main door, downstairs, in one of those befuddled hordes typical of high school field trips, waiting for a little direction.  The photographer shepherd finally appeared and stormed out the door towards the neighboring mezcalaria, and we all left Comala and humbly poured in behind him until everyone was elbow to elbow in the murky green and black cave of the mezcal shop, where bottles seemed to gurgle like exotic fish.  There was room in that grotto for about ten people comfortably; we must’ve been upwards of twenty.  Some people sat on benches, some stood, edging to be nearer to the star.  And he did put on a performance.  He was very well aware of his stature and at the same time slightly contemptuous of it, mocking his wide-eyed followers and their attempts to woo him.

“Amigos!” he cried once he’d received the first swifter of mezcal, “la camera, la camera.”  Everyone raised their glasses in a toast and then the frenzy of philosophizing began.

“Don’t you think,” some young, eager artista offered up, “that the camera changes, um, our perception of reality so that it becomes, oh, difficult to determine…”

“Ay niño,” the photographer cut him off with a slice of arm through air, “the camera does so many things, doesn’t’ it.  Ay, ay?”

“Si!” conceded the niño, his great aesthetic point stamped out like a match.  He let it go, though, admitting to himself that it never really deserved to flourish.  One cowed, but so many more aching to contribute.

After he’d grown bored with the far side of the room, the photographer edged slightly towards the door and ended up catty corner to me, Jorge and a few of our friends.   There, he hooked up with the very nice owner of a popsicle company.  The most successful Oaxacan popsicle company, in fact (there are many).  He was there with his wife, both of them pale-skinned, wealthy, kind, accommodating.  They nodded indulgently as the photographer grinned, weaved, ranted, and drank.  At some point, he engaged Jorge in a bit of conversation about laughter.

“La risa!” It came out with that particular definitiveness of the French, who can say with absolute intellectual certainty– “c’est la vie” or “elles sont comme ça, les femmes” or “ça, c’est Mexique” as if they can just summarize life or Mexico or women in an abrupt aphorism. There is nothing left to do but nod and ponder; the person speaking has just brought the gate crashing down on whatever whimpering ambiguous contribution you might’ve made to the conversation.  So the popsicle company guy and his wife nodded, smiled.

I was bored.

“La risa doesn’t necessarily indicate happiness,” I said.

“Que?” the photographer leaned in towards me, close.

“Que?” It took him a moment to gather that I was speaking to him.

“La risa isn’t always an indication of happiness,” I repeated.  I had absolutely no stake in a relationship with this man, and no care in the world what he thought of me, so why not.

“What are you saying?  What is she saying?”  he asked his captive audience with a grand populist gesture.

“La risa doesn’t always mean happiness.  There are so many types of risa.  In Asia they mean nervousness, a lot of the time, especially if you’re taking photos.  They can mean anger, or bitterness, or cynicism.  You know.  There isn’t just risa, ya, and it’s happy and that’s it.”

“Muy interesante,” he said, stroking his beard, even though it wasn’t, not at all, and it made me wince the following morning and probably would have made him wince, too, had he not been drunk and riding those pseudo-intellectual waves of pseudo-banter in which we all just sort of slosh around making nihilistic masturbatory poetry to be captured on napkins and later destroyed.

A “debate” unfolded.  He somehow managed to defend la risa as an expression of pure, unadulterated happiness, with mumblings about el pueblo mexicano, and I held strong to my interpretation of la risa as an emotion of varied motives and expressions, of which happiness was only one.  Yes.  To even dignify it with a summary far, far overestimates the actual drunken ramble of the thing, which outdid stoned 3 a.m. debates in dorm rooms in degrees of pointlessness and tedium.

At one point, following another, “muy interesante, muy interesante,” the photographer ushered me up to the bar where he promptly ordered three mezcales and then realized he had no money.

“Want to buy me a drink?” he asked slyly, ducking in towards me flirtatiously.

“Are you fucking kidding me?  No.”

“Damn.”

Financial reality killed la risa temporarily, as the photographer scrambled into the rather disappointingly grounded world of hard cash in an attempt to find his assistant.  He shouted through cupped hands at the mezcalaria and out the door.  The assistant didn’t materialize.

The dream of mezcal died.  We meandered back to the other side of the room, as if we’d simply needed a quick visit to the bar to take our dreamy back-n-forth to another level.  It was now more than obvious that this was yet another perk of the artist’s opium den that is Oaxaca.  The adoring nymphs.  I pathetically felt like one.  Laugher?  Why yes, artist man, I think it is the balm of el pueblo.  Should you buy me a mezcal?  Delighted.

I shut down my half of the risa conversation, the money ran out, the photographer grew bored, we milled about, everyone’s intellectual aspirations petering out like deer trails in the woods.  Someone paid, and we were out in the street, now rowdy, half the crew trying to keep the night alive and the other half thoroughly, gratefully resigned to its death.  The latter half left, spiraling off in various directions down cobblestone alleys and narrow streets.  The remaining few, the photographer, the popsicle baron and his wife, a few fans and artists and Jorge and I, hovered and moved like a gelatinous mass towards El Central, the one and only Oaxacan club.  The photographer slurred something about George Bush and got started on losestadosunidos.

“Los estados unidos.”  He said it like he was spitting out a rock. It was another one of those definitive noun-drops, as if just plunking the noun down was enough to triumphantly define its essence and shine awe on the speaker.

He waited, but everyone was too drunk to nod, so he continued.

“You think you run the world, don’t you, you really think you –“

I cut him off.

“I don’t think anything.  I am not the United States.  Maybe you’re too drunk to be able to distinguish the two, but I don’t think I’d make the mistake of calling you Mexico.  Don’t blame me for my country’s sins.  I’m sure you didn’t vote for Calderon or Ulises – I didn’t vote for George Bush.”

He backpedaled frantically.  “Yes, perdon, perdon,” he said gravely, but I was tired.  Over it.  Through with the anthropological experiment of the Oaxacan art world for the evening.  The photographer mentioned something about my writing, something about dancing, and then Jorge cut it all off and we went home.  Later in the week, I’d see him walking, and we’d both stop and look at each other…and then keep walking.

I remember in the 6^th grade my friend Ellen told me defiantly that she didn’t want to read interviews with her favorite celebrities because it was always disappointing to find out what they were really like.  This came as a massive shock to me, who devoured interviews with Julia Roberts as if they were serums that would make me, too, gorgeous and witty and flirty like the Julia of, say, “I Love Trouble.”  I couldn’t get enough.  I wanted to get closer and closer and closer, to know everything.  Ellen was more cautious and cynical.  She knew that eventually Julia would say something inane or insulting and the bubble would burst, and then she wouldn’t be able to enjoy Julia worship with the same purity.

Nothing Julia said disappointed, but probably because I never got close enough, and because Entertainment Weekly has never been anything less than a toadying rag.  I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Julia got mad once and threw a potato at a photographer, but that thirdhand gossip wasn’t enough to tear her down in my esteem.  Besides, she probably had a good reason for it.  So she lived on in the floaty idyllic realm of idols until I was old enough to not care anymore.

But I think all my time in Oaxaca has destroyed the Julia Robertses of this era for me.  Maybe it’s simply because these artists are not my idols, and if I really aspired to their careers or projects or lifestyles I’d feel differently.  Maybe if it were Annie Dillard or Peter Hessler or Azar Nafisi getting drunk off of mezcal and talking about laughter I’d be listening in rapture.

Or maybe it’s just not about them, the Oaxacan artists.  Maybe it’s just what the art world breeds here.  For all I know, it could be what the art world breeds everywhere, but since this is my only case study I suppose I’ll have to heap all the blame and analysis on Oaxaca.  Here there’s so much of that empty intellectual circling in which artists pat each other monotonously on the back, engaging in mutually ingratiating exercises of pseudo-poetic stimulation.  There’s so much worship of Art and Artists as blanket concepts that protect anyone lurking under them, as if they are concepts vast and grand enough to leave anyone who claims loyalty to them shimmering with golden realizations.

I think there is much to be learned from the people we admire.  But I think there is perhaps just as much to be learned from the fact that they are people; flawed, interesting, complex human beings, and that what we do with our lives is as valid as what they do with their lives.  There is a balance between respect and admiration for idols and the confidence and faith that we can also challenge and question them, honestly and without fear.

Otherwise, right, it’s all mutual artistic masturbation, art in and of itself as some elevated noble mission in whatever form, the artist as some noble elevated character no matter his or her work or intentions.

Or maybe the Oaxacan artists have it right, and I just can’t play the game because I don’t believe in it enough.  It’s a way of being and interacting run by codes I don’t understand – I am analytical and logical at heart, and I want sturdy Reason standing behind my arguments (she can raise an eyebrow at times, or wink, but she should be present).  There’s a reasonless, freewheeling aspect of art world that I would call nonsense, and perhaps the artists would call, well, art.  There’s an exclusionary pretension that says we’re the blessed tigers in the bathtub, so let’s splash each other with bubbly suds.  Poof, poof, poof.  There’s also a groveling need for conformity that says let’s talk of cinema and bicycles, and make sure to pause in the right places and show just the right amount of flippancy.

In the meantime I’ll keep playing the gringa on the outskirts, seen by all with thinly veiled pity as the bumbling extranjera who just thinks its all just so so cool.  Just bubbling with excitement to get in on this world of gasp, gulp, ART.

“Really?  You’re an ARTIST?!  Wow.  So…what do you think is the meaning of poetry?”