Tricks of the Trade

Creative types hate getting their hands dirty. Oh, they’ll put religious effigies in jars of piss or paint with cow dung, but ask ’em to pitch their art and they start mumbling to rival Ozzy Osbourne. But artists including Gregory Sale, Tania Katan, and Erin V. Sotak are so keen on shameless self-promotion that they’re doing it publicly at the “Stand Up and Pimp Yourself: 5-Minute Pitches by Nine Artists Who Live in the Margins” event. Each participant gets exactly 300 seconds to sell themselves, whether through a stuffy PowerPoint presentation, theatrical performance, or kickass video montage. “Part of the ‘pimping’ is about how you can score a john in under five minutes,” quips Sotak. “Meaning, how can an individual dynamically express, represent, and promote her/himself in [that time].” Even the event organizers haven’t seen the other artists’ acts, so anything can happen – though Sotak says she’s pretty sure there’ll be no live nudity and that the profanity will be strictly PG-13.

Aw, fuck!