Sure, we’ve seen scalpers make a pretty penny on NHL tickets, especially when hawking coveted prime seats for games that promise to bring long-time Canadian rival teams, the Maple Leafs vs the Canadiens, to a heated face-off that only Torontonians and Montrealers seem to understand the significance of. We assume those inflated black market price-tags get their outrageous asking amounts thanks to the intoxicating power of city loyalties paired with the right amount of accumulated concussions to make $300.00 seem like a reasonable price to pay for a night in a cold stadium where the beer’s still $10.00 per plastic cup draft. We’d much rather spend $300.00 on cable and an electric fireplace or, you know, a one-way flight to Miami, but we digress. This time the Kijiji scalper scandal has nothing to do with ice and pucks, but rather, with art and big bucks.
Perhaps this is a sign that Toronto has finally stepped up its arts scene game, but we were shocked to find out tickets to the famous monthly First Thursday party at the AGO–happening in just two days on February 5–are the hottest black market items on Kijiji this week. Prices range from around $150.00 to $200.00 per ticket with lots of “vendors” holding out for the highest bidder. Who knew Toronto had such a hard on for Andy Warhol’s iconic prodigy, Jean-Michel Basquiat? By the way, he’s the featured artist of the party, in case the Grandmaster Flash performance had you confused about the event. Grandmaster Flash is scheduled to perform while party goers check out the Basquiat retrospective before it’s even open to the public.
If you’ve got $200.00 to spare and no plans on Thursday, we recommend writing a Facebook status update offering to take a friend with a spare ticket to dinner first… because supporting the black market is wrong, unless it’s a show you really just can’t miss. Then you can think of the irony of how faux friends of Basquiat sold doodles he did on scrap paper and napkins for outrageous amounts of money behind his back. Oh art!
Would you pay $200.00 for tickets to the First Thursday Party at the AGO? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @ViewtheVibe.
