Years ago, I was in a marketing workshop. It focused on a case study: promoting a fancy new biscuit. The instructor explained that the target market had been time-poor solo mums, hankering for a daily treat, an affordable luxury. But what to call the biscuit? They resembled Melting Moments, so he called them simply ‘Moments’. Tagline: ‘Give yourself a moment.’ He framed the biscuit as an opportunity for miserable moms to press the whole world—including their absent partners and over-present kids—out of the frame, and attend to themselves for a change. And, as people are suggestible, perhaps it worked, perhaps it became the reward: a temporal interruption in tablet form, a sugar pill, permission to enjoy. I was in two minds about the presentation, which felt cynical. Our instructor seemed to deeply understand the mindset of solo mums, but in order to exploit it. Understanding can assist us in helping others, but also in helping ourselves. Perhaps the instructor would say: everyone wins. I’m not so sure.
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Here I am, at the Scott Redford art giveaway, outside GOMA, last Saturday. It was all the fun of the fair, missing only the candyfloss. Redford was planning to hand out his freebie paintings on cardboard to people as they arrived—you get what you’re given! But, instead, he allowed everyone to rummage around and make their own selection. Good call. People were on the hunt for an overlooked masterpiece, a diamond in the rough, exercising their connoisseurship (or bias), perhaps assuming something special in the work might speak to something special in them.

As Redford gave away his works, undermining his market, it was also the first day of Living Patterns—the abstraction show at Queensland Art Gallery curated by Ellie Buttrose—which he was also in. Young artists, in town to give talks in front of their works there, then headed over to pick a free Redford. Later, at a Negroni bar in Fish Lane, their acquisitions were lined up, with the owners debating and defending their selections, discussing whose was best, the merits of gesturalism over constructivism, etcetera.

Like everyone else, I bonded with my personal pick. Redford offered to inscribe the back. Having curated his work in the past, I suggested ‘You complete me.’ He said no. What about ‘You deplete me.’? He said no. Then, spontaneously, he wrote ‘You are the wind beneath my wings.’ Redford at his most charming.
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