48 Hours/48 Rooms (or Wooster Collective is so 1999)

Howdy!

Apparently everybody is going ga-ga over the big 'art party' hosted by Wooster Collective to celebrate the imminent construction of new condominiums.



In a delightful bit of serendipity, last night I came across my CD-ROM of 48 Hours/48 Rooms, and I emailed Ingrid Bachmann to ask her if I could rip the videos and post them up here. This is the vernissage, and as time permits I will be posting videos of the individual artists and their work.

Ms. Bachmann graciously said 'yes.' And then I came across the New York Times article, and despite the 'no sponsors' and 'no commercialization' being touted, as it was by invitation only, I can only be my bitter-self and assume that everyone involved is smart enough to figure out other, less pedestrian means of scoring scads of cash from this project.

Basically, both 48 Hours/48 Rooms and Wooster on Spring are the same gosh darn thing, except that WoS is seven years behind the times. Yes, there are slight variations, but they only serve to emphasize the differences between the organizers.

48 Hours/48 Rooms was open call, WoS was by invite. 48/48 did not take over a building that already had a rich history of street art and completely ignore and erase the past by trumpeting the new.

And in what I think is the most glorious thing about 48/48 is that the the construction company involved actually put its money where its mouth was and afterwards financed the construction and now runs an art gallery, and has some major attachments to at least one other art gallery, as well as, my guess would be, this one.

Somehow I can't imagine Mr. Elias and Ms. Cummings owning an art gallery, despite this picture.

[Update Friday: My bad, somehow I confused this construction company with this construction company. As far as I know Aldo Construction has never been involved with any art gallery in Montreal.]