LG Williams: Party Every Night
Party Every Night takes the red carpet--the stupidest and most efficient emblem of cultural value--and treats it as sculpture, ritual, and social weapon. The exhibition is built around carpets, ropes, stanchions, a red carpet suit, and twenty-one celebrity-hosted performance parties, a checklist that makes Hollywood publicity look indistinguishable from advanced sculpture. Williams's joke is not merely that celebrity has infected art; it is that art already wants celebrity's architecture of entrance, exclusion, flash, and purchased attention. The press release's deadpan biography and exhaustive checklist intensify the satire, making the event sound at once commercially plausible and spiritually bankrupt. In relation to Take A Fucking Break, the show announces a shift from private exhaustion to public spectacle, from the bed to the velvet rope.
- DATE:
- February 7, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Dave Hickey; Lisa Spellman; Angelina Jolie; Beyonce Knowles; Johnny Depp; Will Smith; Oprah Winfrey; Kanye West; David Lynch; Laura Dern; Kenneth Baker
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- FUCKTHATGALLERY; Facebook; Twitter; University of California, Davis; Kansas City Art Institute; University of Southern California; California College of the Arts; University of Hawaii; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; di Rosa Art Preserve; Lance Fung Gallery; Steven Wirtz Gallery; Gallery Subversive
- KEYWORDS:
- red carpet as sculpture; celebrity architecture of entrance; exclusion and flash as medium; Hollywood publicity indistinguishable from sculpture; celebrity infecting art; velvet rope as institutional form; from bed to velvet rope