This is what I love about NYC: No matter what time it is, it's always go, go, go. The lights were blazing, there was a movie being filmed across the street (Sigourney Weaver was on her way, I was told), people were rushing past me (who's in a rush at 9 at night?). I'm a card-carrying member of the metropolis, but sometimes I like to get caught up in the shock-value of it all.Anyway, the show. The show was full of young, next-best-thing artists. People who gave up paying careers, or never quite found the career worth getting paid for, for the opportunity to think, talk, and make their art, full-time. People who dream in tertiary colors, on purpose. People who wear fashion casually the way a suburban pre-teen might dress up for Halloween.
I considered calling it a scene, but that sounds so subjective. A scene is only a scene, when the scene is not your own. Otherwise, it's home.
I walked from studio to studio, blissfully happy to be in this atmosphere. Excited to see creationism as perceived by a man or woman who doesn't mind paying 20 grand a year for the opportunity.
Art is a funny thing. It's hysterical. It's mind-warping, and weird. I thought I understood art. I thought I got it. I thought at least that I was OK with the moments when I didn't get it. But tonight, I did not get it. I did not get a lot of the things hanging on the walls with push pins, or draped across the floor covered in plaster. I did not get the layer of colored cellophane, the hair glued onto rice paper, the dried plaster mold created by a hand that grabbed the plaster when it was wet.
I did not get Art, tonight, as I sipped my red wine from my plastic cup. But I have to tell you, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it's ambiguity, it's irrelevance, and it's nonsensical fist through the wall. And I enjoyed peering through the wall, into another plaster mold, filled with hair, surrounded by a yellow inner tube.
