Is it what our friend saw? Because if it is, than you saw three drunk young professionals engaging in heavy petting in the closet by the elevator.
Apparently First Fridays’ slutty reputation is perceived as an asset, not a liability by the MCA. If obnoxious drunk girls with whiney cigarette-raped voices and the noxious cocksure assholes who love them weren’t enough, the MCA’s First Fridays have color coded stickers to wear, so you know who to hit on. The lighting is also dim and there is plenty of thumping dance music, too. There might be art around too, but no one is sure.
First Fridays usually mark the opening of the monthly 12x12 shows, probably one of the best sort of programs around. Roughly each month a local emerging artist (there is no good way to word that) gets the opportunity to do a solo project in a small (12'x12') gallery on the main floor. But you wouldn’t know anything about that from this ad. It actually doesn’t even mention any art at all. But, dude, it is one wild club atmosphere.
Conversely, The Art Newspaper reports on Miguel Zugaza, Director of the Prado, and his complete disinterest in the public:
- Mr Zugaza is ambivalent about attracting huge numbers of visitors to the enlarged museum. “Nearly all the important American museums have had extensions built recently. However, I am convinced that in the not-so-distant future people will stop going to museums as much as they do now.”
He criticised the trend for gigantic installations, saying: “This year I saw the Rachel Whiteread show (Embankment) in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London which was a colossal sculptural installation. It made me think about museums as spectacle and the need to generate expectation. This is something that comes naturally to contemporary art museums but not to historical museums. It has produced a very commercial climate in museums, whereby an exhibition’s success is linked to the number of visitors. This will never be one of my aims.”
Yay elitism!
Miguel Zugaza:
hot enough to be a First Friday-goer,
elitist enough to be European.
This may seem a little hypocritical for Art or Idiocy?, your window to the art openings world. But there is an important distinction to make. Art or Idiocy? isn’t against parties and art , or even art-parties. We are just against LAME parties. We are also game from elitism now and again. Art or Idiocy? proudly supports heady art reviews, name dropping and use of complex descriptors in the discussion of art. The writing on here may not always be of the topest notch in the MFA in Art Theory & Criticism sense, but we salute those who do it that way. You see, we here at Art or Idiocy? are proponents of heady artspeak meeting conversational humor and shaking hands.
And then conversational humor reaches around and squeezes heady artspeak's butt.