Most gallery openings simply ask for your attention. Dealer Pietro Alexander‘s inaugural exhibition asked for your attendance at a wedding. Thirty minutes before the doors opened to “The Wedding Show,” the dealer married writer and filmmaker Sara Apple inside his new eponymous SoHo gallery. The gesture lent a splash of sincerity to a moment often defined by industry spectacle, folding a real-world love story in with an art-world curatorial statement.
The exhibition took its cues from another famously public union: Tiny Tim’s 1969 wedding to Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show, a televised event which drew 45 million viewers, and called into question the notion of performed intimacy. That tension has animated “The Wedding Show,” which brings together works by West Coast artists including Billy Al Bengston, Jaxon Demme, Ken Price, and John Altoon alongside New Yorkers such as Cristine Brache, Ryan Brown, and Tallulah Dirnfeld.
For CULTURED, featured artists and wedding guests alike offered up some guide rules for creative relationships, where the art of staying committed—to a person and a practice in tandem—is rarely straightforward, but always worth the trouble.
Laddie John Dill and Pamela Barish, artist and fashion designer
What would you like newlyweds to know about love?
Love is fluid; it ebbs and flows. No cheating no matter what. Weather the emotional storms together. And get a California king bed.
Kay Kasparhauser and Daniel Arnold, artist and photographer
Name something strange your partner does that you adore.
Kay Kasparhauser: Every single New York Times crossword for every single day of the week back to June 2011—that’s not a joke. Loves me when I feel undeserving. Sleeps with his ear folded in half.
Daniel Arnold: Announces every thought. Over-feeds me.
Julia Fox, writer and actor
What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done that other people called a red flag?
Got my boyfriend’s name tattooed TWICE.
Francesca Amfitheatrof, jewelry designer
What’s the difference between designing for love and designing for marriage?
It’s funny how serious people become around the act of marriage and its conventions. Maybe it’s the finality of it all but most often you focus on proportions and equilibrium. This becomes timeless and nearly invisible. There is incredible beauty in this, but it can at times be challenging.
Designing for love instead is total freedom. You create emotion and you want to radiate happiness. You focus on the individual and what vibrates between them. It’s joyous and has no rules.
Peri Gilpin and Christian Vincent, actor and artist
What’s the most toxic thing about dating another creative person?
Peri Gilpin: I guess the fear is your work won’t be respected by your partner because they’re so preoccupied with their own work, but I have not found that in my relationship with my husband.
Christian Vincent: I would say the pressure that can sometimes show its head is comparing where you are, as far as finding attention in your creative endeavors, because of the rollercoaster effect of being an artist or actor.
What’s a moment recently where you felt especially proud of your partner?
Gilpin: I’m always blown away at what a great dad he is, and I think that comes through when he paints people, their bodies, their intentions, and the moments of life he chooses, because his intense sensitivity towards other humans comes through in a lot of emotional and powerful ways.
Vincent: As an actor, one goes through the relentless process of auditioning, absorbing, and dealing with rejection. The way she prepares for projects and handles that puts her in a different class of person.
Cristine Brache and Brad Phillips, artists
What’s the sexiest thing about your partner’s brain?
Cristine Brache: We have freaky brains. It can’t be helped. It’s super hot to meet your match, intellectually.
Brad Phillips: How big and juicy and smart her brain is. Bigger and smarter and juicier than mine.
What’s your shared addiction right now?
Brache: The way the light changes throughout the day in our new apartment; ’90s bottom-of-the-barrel films; our cat, Cherry; sketchy YouTube “documentaries.”
Phillips: Resting.
What’s a moment recently where you felt especially proud of your partner?
Brache: Every time I look at his watercolor paintings or read his writing I feel proud of him. But I am more proud of him when he has good jokes.
Phillips: I’m always proud of Cristine. I was proud watching her crank out paintings for a beautiful show.
What advice would you give to two creative people dating each other?
Brache: Have a 10-plus year age gap.
Phillips: Invest in the stock market.
Saam Niami, curator and writer
Does your relationship with Simona Mastrolia make your work better or more complicated?
I’d be in a gutter somewhere without her.
What’s your shared addiction right now?
A Yemeni restaurant opened around the corner from me, and we’ve been at least five times in the past month. We both loved The Drama and thought everyone that didn’t like it were pussies. We went to Paris last October for one of my shows (Simona’s first time there), and we are trying to go back at least twice this year.
What’s the best thing about being with another creative person? And the worst?
Best thing is that she makes every day magical and makes living beautiful. Worst thing is that her taste is better than mine.
What’s a moment recently where you felt especially proud of your partner?
She landed a project designing a movie theater in New York (Shorts, coming this September).
Yahshel and Katherine Rose, artists
What’s the most toxic thing about dating another creative person?
Katie Rose Cullen: The fumes, maybe? Disagreeing over furniture orientation.
Yahshel: Nothing, unless you choose to make it toxic.
What’s the most attractive thing about the way your partner thinks or creates?
Cullen: Always three steps ahead of me, or the way that her camera literally sees me (extremely flattering).
Yahshel: She takes the road less traveled, like three or four paths, all at once. And how much she knows about art history. Massive brain storage.
What’s a moment recently where you felt especially proud of your partner?
Cullen: When she fined a drunk white guy $150 for saying the N-word on-mic at the karaoke we co-host on Tuesdays. He tapped his phone and it went straight to the bartenders. He’s also banned now.
Yahshel: When she bought a rock. You’ll see.
What advice would you give to two creative people dating each other?
Cullen: If you can’t fuck with their work—if you can’t respect or don’t love their work—it will eventually become breakup fuel. Be honest with yourself.
Yahshel: Don’t tell each other what to do or how to do it, let them be. And have very, very, very beautiful sex.
Jaxon Demme, artist
What’s your shared addiction right now with your partner, Oszkar Nosek?
Upstate New York. Jamaican food. Mango sticky rice. Puppets. Jeans. Diet Snapple. Not smoking and smoking. Salmon belly. New York Times Crossplay. A little bang. The perfect haircut and length. Playing with Oszkar’s hair.
What’s the best thing about being with another creative person? And the worst?
Everything’s funny all the time. Everything is serious. Everything matters. Everything is free.
What’s the most attractive thing about the way your partner thinks or creates?
Wow, everything. We’re so opposite. I love the way he lets things cure and jumps when the time feels right. He thinks in a way that excites me and makes me want to expand.
What’s a moment recently where you felt especially proud of your partner?
Watching him make music, effortlessly. Also the way he communicates with his peers.
What advice would you give to two creative people dating each other?
Have fun, giggle.
Kennedy Wright, writer
Have you ever embarrassed yourself for someone you loved?
Yes, and I don’t think I’d be able to love the way I love without doing so. I am very much one to profess a love regardless of its reciprocated. For some, that’s a humiliation ritual. For me, it keeps me regular. Like a light jog.
Sasha Rosenberg, art publicist
Does your relationship make your work better or more complicated?
BETTER.
What’s the fight you’ve had that could only happen between two art people?
Me insisting we buy a piece from every friend’s exhibition/gallery we attend, and him asking if I’d like to see Italy this summer or just fund the local art scene indefinitely.
Who’s more likely to turn a personal crisis into material, between you and your partner, Mike Brewer?
Me, the Capricorn.
What’s your shared addiction right now?
Richard Prince (forever and always our shared addiction), Mariscos el submarino, and for fragrance, my Lavender sleep spray.
What advice would you give to two creative people dating each other?
Genuinely celebrate each other’s wins.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
At 101, the Chinese American Artist Ce Roser Is Finally Getting Her Big Break
Yes, Kane Parsons Directed ‘Backrooms.’ Here’s How It All Went Down.
The Gayest Places in New York, According to Queer Culturati
Director Boots Riley and George Clinton Disagree About the Future of A.I.
The 8 Must-See Movies at Tribeca This June, According to the Ultimate Insider
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