It’s A Wrap: The Art Handling Olympics Results Are In!

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

The results from the first ever Art Handling Olympics are in! Check out the action, and the team uniforms, in the New York Times photo story and read the full play by play, as covered by Art Fag City.

From the New York Times:

“Art handlers,” writes Randy Kennedy, are “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, 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, critics, fellow artists and just about everyone in the art world, not excluding themselves.”

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Compete in the First Ever Art Handling Olympics!

What would art institutions be without their art handlers? These individuals endure the barrage of directives from nit-picky curators to hang a work “just so”, to pack the unpackable, to prevent the breakable from breaking, and to deliver the load of even the most unreasonably sized work of art…all so that our white cubes present well.

Are you an art handler? Well, now you can put your skills to the test in the first ever Art Handling Olympics! Compete against teams of other sadistic art handlers and go for the gold! If you’re wondering what to expect, let the titles of The Games speak for themselves:

• Special Delivery – I can only imagine this will involve a jenky delivery truck, a broken freight elevator, and possibly a few flights of stairs.

• The Static Hold – As the organization puts it: “Can you hold that up so I can see what it looks like?”

• How’s it Hangin’ – A little to the left?

• Pack it In – Imagine building a crate that needs to ship to China in 2 hours. Now fill it with a collection of 250 breakable objects that need individual packing. Be careful! These are priceless. (I’m just taking a gander here…)

• The Eliminator – Kinda speaks for itself.

If you aren’t one of those die hard handlers who skipped all this and have already signed up, you have 40 days and counting!

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