The other night, I went to the opening of the NSFW (“Not Safe For Work”) show at the offices of Gawker. (Full disclosure: my girlfriend co-curated the show with her sister.) Here’s a picture from the show:
photo by Nick McGlynn
Looks fun, and it was fun. Great art, ok wine, fabulous people, etc. The central concept of the show was lurid sexual imagery of the kind that is not suitable for you to check out on your computer while at work – Not Safe For Work – and the show becomes a clever recontextualization of this heretofore web-only abbreviation. You can see the artists’ work here: Steve Ellis, Emiliano Granado, Heather Morgan, Justine Lai, and Randy Polumbo. If you want to see the work in person, the show will be at Fountain Art Fair on Pier 66 in nyc as well, March 4-7.
Great work. But I wasn’t shocked. My point: I don’t know if I can be shocked by a painted/photographed/sculpted image anymore. Even photos of various desecrations, maulings, murders, annihilations, dismemberings…I feel like I’ve seen a lot of gory stuff. Even this?
Gotta be honest: not shocked.
Related digression: You late-1990s New Yorkers remember the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum, way back before the turn of the millennium, right? Our then-mayor called the work in the show “sick stuff,” without ever having seen the show of course, and lines to see the show were then blocks and blocks long. And the work was audacious and a little shocking to many. I don’t know if I was actually shocked, but definitely moved. I was younger, maybe shock-able? What separates me now, blogging and such, and me back in 1999, fiddling with my Star Tac antenna, besides a few grey hairs and a some battle scars from late night struggles with cynicism?
A theory: 9/11. That was the ultimate shock art event. Of course, killing 3,000 people is not traditionally an artistic act, and I, like Stockhausen, am not suggesting that whomever carried out those attacks was a great artist worth name-checking or admiring.
However, the event of 9/11 was, and remains, THE ULTIMATE EVENT. There is no more dramatic single performance than what those guys did on that day, to most living Americans at least. And that event rendered everything afterwards kind of, well, cute. Not only did it destroy thousands of lives, engender two specious and disastrous wars, and arguably drag the US into potential Roman-Empire-style decline, the World Trade Center attack destroyed the possibility of anyone making a real, paradigm-shifting event for a very long time.
So, my question is, can art shows create riots now, in the USA. Maybe if you starve a dog like that Costa Rican artist? Is anyone shocked by Lady GaGa’s outfits? Or any outfit or painting, really? What am I overlooking here? Because I’m feeling like, since 9/11, it’s kinda like whatever you know what I’m sayin. Eh?
