Yes, but...oh, it IS art, isn't it. The gallery was a dead giveaway.

We failed to attend all the photographic exhibitions in Chelsea before sundown.

A picture:

Krissa is wearing lacy black underpants and a white wifebeater, and lying next to me on the bed as I type naked with the Mac resting dangerously in my lap (it is unbearably warm and humid in the city tonight, so I hope you'll excuse my abhorrent nude intrusion into this otherwise rather saucy mental image). This innocent white iBook G4 is being prevented from wiping future generations of human beings into ignominous inexistence through the intervention of a pillow 'twixt ball and battery. That's a regular pillow, folks, just a spongey $19.99 thing, available from all good bedding shops. Preservation of near-infinite numbers of grateful descendants is included in the price.

Anyway, after that short soft porn and gene pool-themed interlude (of which there can never be too many, let's be honest), we shall get back to what everyone wants to hear about - buckets and buckets of Art.

So there's quite a lot of galleries in Chelsea, as it turns out. And more than a few of them have photographic exhibits. So we didn't make it around all of them, but we did find a pretty good pub after seeing more than a few.

The first stop was Hiroshi Sugimoto's Conceptual Forms. This one literally leapt off the page of reviews in New York magazine with the stunning assertion 'a new series of photographs of stereometric plaster models used in the late nineteenth century to illustrate complex trigonometric functions'. Indeed, it was my motivation to see these photos that got us up and running at exhibitions all day today.
Honest.
In effect the photos were underwhelming and dry. The artist's assertion that unintentional art is more valuable and in fact better than art which is intended wasn't exactly borne out - his close up shots of mechanical devices were also a bit...flat. And this is the opinion of someone who likes looking at mechanical devices. I am a mechanical device enthusiast...but somehow...nah. Didn't work.

But at the other end of the spectrum was something which Krissa really wanted to see because she thought it would be bad - Gregory Crewdson's Beneath the Roses at the Luhring Augustine gallery. I'm a fan of photography. Marrying an adept photographer will do that to a man. I feel that the challenge of photography lies within the art of anticipation and visualisation, the art of execution and skill, and finally within judgement and presentation. Capturing a moment is easy. Capturing a moment which communicates and engages a viewer, which endures in the mind and has value because of those attributes is manifestly difficult.
Beneath the Roses isn't like that. The scenes are fake, created, artificed.
The subject was suburbia...recurring themes of roses and pills and lovelessness and decay and loneliness echoed throughout the incongruous and unsubtle tableaux. Everything about the pictures was staged; to the point of people in cars carrying lights in their laps to better show their faces, spot lamps behind bushes threw bizarre shadows across people beside train tracks, and pill bottles and cosmetic products were all turned to show their names to the camera, while impossibly dirty household fittings dotted scenes, and messages so unsubtle as to be the photographic equivalent of a raging temper tantrum were presented in each photograph.
I didn't like it at all. I thought it had all the artistic value of that painting: 'Dogs At Cards'...something which a couple of the photos actually reminded me of.

We also saw an interestingly brief mini exhibit of Weegee's Idiot Box...a single small white room of about ten black and white photos of 1940s TV...and a TV showing 1940s TV. Didn't really know what to do...so we left.

These are the ones I can remember through reading back through the listings in New York magazine...we ventured through the funky swinging doors of a bundle of other places, which included some interesting wall-sized paintings emblazoned with stand-up comics' one liners, backed with the contents of a few of the artist's chequebooks...some interesting commentary on the future of living space...some porcelain puppies, a woman who photographed herself in about twenty different costumes, and, topping us off on the weird-shit-o-meter, an odd blobble thing, sitting in an upstairs gallery room by itself, with three faces of different colours; six eyes, three mouths, all conversing and shouting at each other unintelligibly.

The pub was called 'The Half King'. It's on 23rd and 10th Avenue, and they do a wicked Mac and Cheese.

I also invested in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and some Aviator sunglasses. All in all, a great day, especially rounded off as it was by Krissa and I deciding to go into a Mexican restaurant where the waiter brought us two extra margheritas by mistake.

But none of this matters, because you're still thinking about me being naked, aren't you?