Friday night I found myself in a dingy room with shredded drop-ceiling panels, glue tracks lining the floors, and a crusty gray carpet with piles of paint chips in the corners. I gazed at an ugly fluorescent light that looked like it had collapsed against a dirty wall, gasping for breath. It was missing its protective panel and middle bulb, and I wondered, Is that supposed to be art?
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I was at the Nova Young Art Fair afterparty slash open house for Bridge magazine’s brand-new Network of Visual Art, a 6,000-square-foot dividable work space available to artists, galleries, and not-for-profits for dirt cheap rent–$1-$1.50 per square foot. Situated over a transmission-repair shop in the West Loop, the space used to house a Michelin tire outlet and later a bunch of punk kids who left a wake of dirty laundry, dried-up pools of vomit, pissed-in containers, and beer cans–piled five feet high in some places, according to Nova director and Bridge editor Michael Workman. A couple of guitars were still smashed into the walls long after the kids were evicted a few months ago–the instruments are now part of an installation by Erik Wenzel. Bridge paid over $15,000 to get the space up to code and cleaned it up enough to look like a place you might be murdered in. Having grown up in just that kind of setting–at one point we lived in an abandoned gas station in Missouri–I felt completely in my element.
“They talked about it like it was on par with those other shows,” Workman told me at the party. “But we weren’t staging that scale of an exhibition. . . . We always saw ourselves as an adjunct. We weren’t promising A grade. This is above an auto shop.” Workman said his show was intended to expose artists who haven’t gotten a lot of attention yet. “There’s a lot of art that doesn’t get seen,” he said. “Maybe the artists aren’t hip enough, or they’re not playing the game, or they don’t have ten grand for a booth in an art fair.” People seem to assume that anyone not repped by a gallery isn’t any good, he said. “It’s domino psychology, and I don’t like that.”
Just before heading to the Nova party I got a phone call from an editor at a national celebrity magazine I occasionally do research for. She asked if I might like to spend the rest of the weekend in Toledo looking for information on a certain actress who found herself on the cover of every tabloid last week with her creepy, toothy, older new boyfriend.
An off-duty cop with her index finger in a metal splint stepped in and the girl broke loose and attacked her. The cop unwound the gauze from her finger and tried to tie up the girl gone wild. Four policemen finally showed up to cart her away.
