The official PowerBall 11 poster

I am smoking pot in a Winnebago, trying to convince Richard Lambert, proprietor of West Queen West club The Social, to take off his wet underwear. They’re slowly making their way past a set of skinny hips cut like zirconium, hedging towards the precipice of a furry belly button, when the expensive boxer briefs stop in their tracks. “Shouldn’t have gone in the hot tub,” Lambert slurs in a muddled British accent. “But I just had to do it.”

The perky if wasted event planners sitting beside me, all passing whittled Benson and Hedges cigarettes to each other (“They’re bitch sticks,” one assures me, “but we’re not bitches”), are having fun tonight, though they’re not sure what to make of like, all this art. Mounted on the trashy trailer's wall is a poster by conceptual New York artist Lawrence Weiner that says something profound about modernism using at least 60 different $50 words.

Outside, Jamie’s Area curator Bonny Poon is lining up for roasted pig. Bob Dylan is assuring us that all he really wants to do is maybe be friends with us, though his position on the iPod soundtrack will soon be usurped by AC/DC desiring something much more graphic. “Do we have any more drugs?” one blonde asks another, as the J gets officially killed. I’ve never smoked pot in a Winnebago before. But tonight, there's good reason: we're part of an installation.

The PowerBall, Harbourfront’s annual gala fundraiser for the Power Plant art gallery, is Toronto’s grandest intersection of art and commerce. Now in its 11th year, the party is helmed by curator Clint Roenisch and socialite Cleophee Eaton, and the theme of last night's edition is “One Louder,” a la Spinal Tap (though the only noticeable similarity between the party and Rob Reiner's classic mock-doc is a rapidly disappearing supply of mini-hamburger h'ors doeuvres that would certainly make Nigel Tufnel flustered).

Though we are supposedly in the midst of hard economic times, the Power Ball is an exceedingly generous event. A $160 ticket will net you free drinks all night long from one of four open bars (serving everything from dirty martinis to ice cold bottles of 50), while free catered food from the likes of Dufflet, Oddfellows and McCain’s gets passed around on trays by poker-faced servers. On top of that you get live music, local celeb DJs (Will Munro) and, well, cool art: there are smashed cars and real cedar trees growing in the gallery; viewable porn through self-installed glory holes; and road movies projected in a car-seat theatre. By all accounts, this should be the most jubilant, debaucherous display of contemporary-art fundraising ever. So why do so many real estate agents want to give me their card?

The artists themselves feel the same way. “These people don’t care about anything,” says $100 bass player Paul Mortimer, whose countrified indie-rock opened the festivities at 9pm. “They look at us like we’re an installation, and what they don’t realize is that we love country music and we mean this.”

Sure, songs like “No Great Leap,” which Mortimer explains is about “taking the TTC to work in the morning and wanting to kill yourself,” probably mean nothing to people like Jeff from Oakville, who owns a “profitable construction company” and keeps telling me how much I resemble his grade-school librarian. For Jeff, the PowerBall is a night out in the Big Smoke with free drinks and weird art, and nothing needs to be contextualized. But for the artists, it’s a little more complicated than all that.

“It’s like a big frat party in here… you see people come in and ask, ‘Is this a club?” relates regular Power Plant contributor Luis Jacob. “But it’s necessary. This is what keeps the doors open to the gallery all year long, and if it exposes people who would normally never walk through the Power Plant to something new, that’s a good thing.”

It’s easy to stare at the pneumatic breasts of magic tanned socialites and wonder why you’ve never seen them at the MoCCA. But as the relationship between art and commerce grows more complicated and co-dependent, struggling artists get even more freaked out by the display of money they don’t have.

Or, they just make rich people wear fake butts. Jon McCurley and Amy Lam, known as the conceptual comedy duo Life Of A Craphead, have about 75 of these plastic posteriors, shipped in from Ohio, and propped up on a backdrop for photo ops. They’re exquisitely round and white, made from the same hollowed-out material as a Halloween mask. And when strapped onto one corporate type's Azzedine Alaia mini-dress as she poses for a picture, you’re not quite sure who is making an ass of whom.

I guess it doesn’t matter, as I watch National Post gossip columnist Shinan Govani announce triumphantly to his friends over by the Dean Baldwin installation, “I finally found the story!” By now it’s almost 1am, and the socialites are beginning to teeter on their Christian Louboutins towards the exit. Though it probably won't make Shinan's column, the real story of Power Ball is that artists need donors, and that donors need to feel artistic. Complimentary drinks make the uneasy equalities between class, identity and even race go down easier.

And, hey, everyone likes dancing to techno remixes of “Bette Davis Eyes,” especially the guy pelvic-thrusting on the dance floor, trussed up like Sergeant Pepper and hitting on anything that moves, including the cedars. I smoke another bitch stick — this time offered up by truly excellent video artist Alison Kobayashi, who looks smart and charming in a sequined beret — and observe the roller-derby girls do one last lap around the tiki bar. (One tells me that she’s been assigned to “basically start shit and bump into people” — which, as far as shit-disturbing tactics go, sure beats last year's assemblage of drunk dudes in panda suits hired to simulate furry sex until they got tired.)

Does the Nuit Blanchification of art that matter really make a difference when your Nevan martini comes with a raspberry coulis? Back in the Winnebago, the guy from The Social suddenly remembers he has a girlfriend, which means the underwear isn’t coming off. “That’s bullshit!” the event planners protest. Nope, it’s art.  

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