CLUB 21 - remaking the scene

ABOUT THE PROJECT

CLUB 21 - Remaking the scene
curated by Oxana Maleeva, sound and performance curator Steve Piccolo

There is a great deal of interest today in fertile art scenes that flourished before the personal computing/Internet revolution. (Consider the recent shows 'Looking at Music' at MoMA, and the re-examination of The Picture Generation at the Met, both in NY last year).
These scenes usually gravitated around clubs, gathering places for artists, filmmakers, dealers, patrons, muses, players.
One of the most positive things about the New York scene in the 1980s, the scene in Perestroika-era Russia, the English and California punk scenes, just to name a few, was the mixture of art, music, cinema, performance, literature, often all being done by the same people or groups of people. The genealogy starts with the cabarets of Montmartre in the 1800s and seems to stop, in a way, with the spread of the Internet.
The Internet has made this kind of ongoing social contact obsolete... or has it? There is much nostalgia today for the lost scene, and a greater need than ever perhaps for locations of physical, face- to-face interaction and discussion among artists of different disciplines and levels, and between art and its audience.
Art museums, galleries and even big exhibitions (biennials, fairs) are certainly not filling the gap, in spite of attempts to “re-socialize” institutional settings.

But what could the art/club scene of the 21st century be like?
Artists of several generations reflect on this question, proposing new ideas.