Light bites instead of a seated dinner? Terrible wine? We don’t mind! Spirits were high in the New York art world last week, it seemed. Fascism’s pall could be collectively willed away for several consecutive minutes at a time; conversation, when it did turn serious, often referred abstractly to the window of opportunity we might find in the collapse of institutions, to the silver lining of a market in decline, and so on. A spate of articles on the end of cultural criticism and the total lunar eclipse in Pisces drew me intermittently into a state of self-reflection, but even that wasn’t all bad.
Last September, as I wrote in my Big Picture column—my first piece for the then brand new Critics’ Table (!)—I started the season outside the Times Square Olive Garden. Last Wednesday, I began it at the perhaps equally unlikely Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan—that sleek, sunlit commuter hub like almost nothing else in the subway system’s decrepit warren of tunnels. (I guess there’s something appealing to me about starting “Armory Art Week” at the outer limit of its social-spatial bubble.) I was there for the launch of artist Chloë Bass’s If you hear something, free something, a public sound work presented by Creative Time in partnership with MTA Arts & Design. A small crowd gathered on the building’s below-ground main level to watch performers, positioned in various places around the atrium, read a series of “announcements” that, recorded in five languages, will play in 14 stations through Oct. 5.
As the work’s title suggests, the audio snippets encourage contemplation and connection—the celebration of “all these little private worlds coinciding out in public,” one voice muses—instead of, say, racist paranoia. The audience was delighted. So was I, though the somber associations of the warm, early-September weather and financial-district site weren’t lost on me—especially in light of Bass’s deep riff on the Department of Homeland Security’s indelible post-9/11 “If You See Something” tagline. The artist’s approach may seem subtle given the stakes of our moment, but I did think, as I boarded my train, heading uptown, that she might have the right idea, that her quixotic intervention in straphanger psychogeography might at least help spread the radical communist DEI value of being neighborly.
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