On my way to 27th street openings last night, I ran into a gallerist who informed me that his MySpace page had been removed due to an innocuous posting of his stubbed toe. For those who are wondering when and why MySpace became headline news around here, one need only spend two minutes on that site typing in their favorite pop culture, film, media phenomenon to find out. I defy you to find something or someone with any kind of cultural presence who isn’t on that damn site. Oh wait, I covered that.*
It is for this reason, that when I was told this news, my first reaction was one of utter shock and dismay. For one thing, it affects my own “friend” numbers – a great problem in and of itself. Arguably more important is the fact that censorship standards appear to be applied somewhat randomly by the myspace unnecessary-grossness police. They can weed out the friends who will be sending me mail I might actually want to read, but it appears as though their hands are tied when it comes to women named bRanDy, who like to laugh.
Needless to say, this news, and well, dinner, delayed my trip to the now famous 27th street, so by the time I got there it was opening city, (and by opening city, I mean there were three). Normally there isn't such a large volumn of traffic for a couple of openings, but Wallspace, and ATM gallery, were both launching group shows, which meant more participating artists and their friends on location. Also, Foxy Production opened the work of Jessica Ciocci, a member of the very popular collective Paper Rad, so this pretty much ensured a large number of comic book, video gamer, pop culture geeks would attend.
Unfortunately, since I arrived near the end of these openings, the scene was a bit of a zoo, and managed to look at about three pieces (all of which are posted at Tom Moody's blog), and drink some Bud light. Since I'm not about to review a can of beer, a write up will have to wait until I can make comments on things more pertinent than whether I approve of artist Jacob Ciocci's mustache. The jury’s still out on that one.
*Let me add MoMA as the first of many east coast institutions who are in need of a MySpace page.
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