So on friday night I went to SNÖFRID N°0 – World Premiere at the Fruit & Flower Deli. It sounded interesting so I thought i’d check it out. What a phenomenal waste of time. It is rare that I actually feel like this and even more rare that I write about it on culturebot. I suppose if I had received a press kit there would be an in-depth explanation of Allan Kaprow and the whole idea of “happenings”, etc.   and yes, upon entering the crowded gallery my first thought was, “oh, this must have been what it was like in the 60’s when they talk about happenings…”

But  without the benefit of some sort of footnotes contextualizing the event, I found the actual experience an embodiment of the very worst of the NYC art scene. Basically an enormous pack of disheveled trustfund hipsters standing around, crammed into a room, getting wasted on cheap beer and airplane-bottle booze and looking self-satisfied about how clever they were by merely standing around looking cool. from what I saw the basic pattern for the evening was this: people stood around looking at each other. every once in a while some drunken blonde girl would stumble around the room screaming “performance!” and another disheveled drunk girl would climb on a box and spout three lines of poetry and stumble off.

the only interesting thing that happened was at one point some guy, I don’t know his name, had all four of his limbs tied to bicycles and they started riding, pulling him off the ground, kind of like a re-enactment of being drawn and quartered. And that was pretty amusing.

but my overall impression was a resounding: whatever.

art school shenanigans for people with too much time on their hands.