A Gallery Based on Facebook Hosts Fake Yelp Reviews of a Real-ish Bar

For the past few months, my Facebook news feed has been a little weirder than usual. This is largely thanks to Papa John’s Projects, an online art space that exists exclusively on Facebook. The platform launched on the first of this year, kicking off a program of 30 solo shows in 30 days, starting with the artist Jim Drain. Papa Johns Projects is the brainchild of artist Hugo Montoya. He hands the admin controls of the page over to a different artist for a set period of time, usually one to a couple of days. Selected artists can post text, photos, links or videos—which are then delivered, like so much pizza, to the news feeds of the page’s subscribers.

A few days ago, the site began posting text that seemed like Yelp reviews of a dive bar in Los Angeles, alongside blurry photos of anonymous bar patrons bathed in green neon light. None of the images or reviews seemed to be describing the same physical space. Something about the vignettes and images—which range from sterile, standard Yelp fare to personal, vaguely surreal anecdotes—piqued my curiosity. Mostly, it seemed like a place I wanted to go.

It turns out that the bar is real. Sort of. The project is a “retrospective” of SOME TIMES, a pop-up bar/artwork by Meghan Gordon. Some of the reviews are real, others are fiction based on the artist’s experiences with the project. One is a quote from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. For the past year, SOME TIMES has popped-up in different venues across Los Angeles, attracting both those in-the-know who come for specific art happenings and passers-by who are lured in by its white and green neon sign. One of the most interesting aspects of SOME TIMES is that it originally began “as a response to artists’ needs at the California Institute of the Arts”; a social space to fill the void between art school and the real world.

One of the many lines from Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in The Art World that has always stuck with me is her description of CalArts’ relatively suburban isolation: “Los Angeles isn’t a city so much as a solar system where different neighborhoods might as well be different planets. The real distance from CalArts to the Valley or Beverly Hills is not that great, but the psychological rift is huge.” I read that book while attending grad school in the suburbs. One of the things I missed the most about my urban, undergraduate experience was the neighborhood dive bar which faculty, staff, and students would walk to and mingle after or in-between classes. Reading the reviews of SOME TIMES, I miss that experience even more.

SOME TIMES and Papa John’s Projects both seem to be bridging the rift between an art space and a mundane, accessible platform (bar, Facebook). This project—not quite straight-forward documentation and not-quite entirely fiction—is especially successful because it borrows from the familiar format of the user review. Part of the appeal of Papa Johns Projects is how stealthily it subverts the imagery and tactics of corporate branding—sneaking a little bit of weirdness into the predictable world of viral marketing. I like that both offer the possibility of catching the attention of audiences who might not be seeking an art-viewing experience. But again, mostly, SOME TIMES seems like a place I want to grab a drink—less pretentious than a gallery, cheaper than most bars, and offering all those chance encounters one just doesn’t have within an MFA program.

Tagged as: Facebook, Hugo Montoya, los angeles, Meghan Gordon, Papa Johns Projects, Some Times