Interview with the Owners of Portland’s Stand Up Comedy Boutique

« Read the full blog

Posted in: Everything Else
June 1, 2009 by Jessica P. | Comments Off

Just when we thought PDX couldn’t get any better, we discovered Stand Up Comedy a bountiful boutique that stocks rare art publications, gorgeous clothing, and sexy objects. Check out excepts below from a fantastic interview with co-owner/entrepreness Diana Kim via Dream Sequins.

“We’re both interested in the absurd, so the name and the shop are a kind of challenge to ourselves, to remember,” Kim says. “We love comedy and stand up especially and are interested in its practice as a way of looking at the world we live in now… To laugh is to be on the edge of crying, right? The intangible quality that exists in between those two impulses feel very subversive. It’s like, what if you had an idea but no words to express it? That’s why the shop exists.”

The shop, Kim explains, operates on a set of default rules, which reads, appropriately enough, like an artist’s mission statement:

Stay within your budget. Have a memorizable inventory. Don’t add anything fixed to the space that doesn’t already exist in some form, only take away. Do not stock anything that can already be found locally. Make a website using a free program. Make it a living archive. Do not deviate from the standard template. Do not style products in the shop. Do not style products on the website. Do not attempt to cultivate an experience, only hope for the best. When a project is done in the shop, it becomes a shop project. Nothing should happen behind closed doors, no matter how messy or odd it may seem to a visitor. It’s all small ways of acknowledging that art becomes life becomes work becomes art. And on a more brutal note, that retail environments don’t have to be precious; neither does inventive, really special work of all kinds have to be.

For inventory, Kim says both she and Silberstein buy for the store together and “talk about every piece in minute detail before buying it.” Typically, she says, they buy only a few pieces of each item: “When buying, it’s better for us to be rather austere. Otherwise, too many outside influences can infiltrate.” In addition to price point and quality, Kim says “the main criteria are whether or not the thing adds a continuum to the story of the shop at the moment; and, does it help the creator reach a new audience or does it help the audience to be introduced to a new maker.”

Comments are closed.