Friends with You

The Friends with You Show in the Hole on the Bowery explores issues of cuteness, or perhaps it is just cute, and play. There are slick bright surfaces filling a big white space. A large inflated balloon like toy fills a room. Slick colorful pattern lollipop-like objects whirr on walls and inflated cartoon figures venture off into the night, literally walking into the street. The website and accompanying catalogues tell more about the general agenda:friends with you . I like the Moomin trollish large dark spiritual creature.

There seems to be a lot of prevalence of and anxiety about, virtual worlds lately. Like the fairy realms of older stories it seems like the cyberspace and commercial space are filled with realms into which you can wander and never come back. Everyone in the future is going to have an avatar and go dancing in Second Life instead of the real world.

But at the same time, the tendency toward playfulness seems to be sincere. It's good for adults to have a playground. I like
bouncy mushrooms...

The Rainbow City is a huge playground of colorful inflated balloons, for adults and children, which is making an appearance near the High Line this summer (now). It is supposed to promote "magic, luck and friendship" ( according to the creators ) around New York City. Its first manifestation was in art Basel Miami. It seems like it might function as a site of interaction of the public of the relatively elevated, natural High Line, the now commercial but once and perhaps still edgy (much edgier than the Eatontown Mall in NJ for example) Meatpacking/ Chelsea arts district, and still undeveloped regions near the port authority/lincoln tunnel.

The world and particularly the art world is based increasingly on who you know. At the same time people succeed in groups. Maybe a space like this will promote new types of collaboration. Hopefully a collaboration which isn't strictly commercial, but perhaps playful and random and like an unmoored balloon veering off in unexpected directions.