A lady friend of mine (she knows who she is) accompanied me to the ICA last Friday night. It's taken me a while to collect my thoughts on the evening, as I was overwhelmed by how much fucking fun I had.
Ok so...for those of you not in the know, the ICA = Institute of Contemporary Art. I don't tell you this to insult your intelligence. I tell you this because both my lady friend and I had to look it up, yet neither of us had admitted this to each other.
I had gotten some free tickets to the ICA from a co-worker and was trying to think who would be fun to go with, who might be interested in weird shit (because, let's be honest, that's what most contemporary art is), and who I could tolerate for a few hours on a Friday night after a hellish work week (because that list of people is quickly becoming very, very short. It's me, it's not you).
On this particular evening, I got caught up at work, even though I was determined to leave at 4:30, but of course one of the owners, right before I was headed out, had to talk to me for 8 minutes about how he was unsatisfied with his most recent flight (that he had just returned from, that I had booked, because I'm basically a personal assistant now) and what I need to do differently next time. Instead of telling him to book his own fucking flight if he didn't like how I booked it, I just smiled and nodded and flew past him, as he was asking me while I was leaving before 5.
So I finally met my lady friend at the train station and we made our way over the the Seaport. We couldn't find the main entrance to the ICA because apparently even the way you get in the building has to be unexpected, unique and different. Sigh. Then we couldn't figure out what floor to go to but found one of the exhibit halls completely by accident, after almost entering some sort of strange sound studio/office where I'm pretty sure a couple of guys were fighting about cubicle culture.
So for the next hour, we acted like 12 year olds, making fun of all the ridiculous shit that someone, somewhere, has labeled as art. Some examples: a video of an underwearless black dude walking down a sidewalk; some pictures that the artist definitely took when he was high as a kite, in which he drew a "half pipe" with chalk on pavement and then took a series of pictures "skateboarding" on the chalk half pipe; and then another video of the same pothead artist spray panting...and then re-spray panting a wall. However, not all of it was ridiculous. There was a really cool exhibit that we got into which experimented with the possibilities of sound and space, but not without some requisite pussy jokes that couldn't be passed up.
The staff at that place is...something else. I got more dirty looks in that place than I've gotten in the last week combined. That's a lot of dirty looks!
We were pretty fed up with the ICA at this point, only because we thought it was pretty stupid and mildly boring. THEN...we saw it.
On the back deck of the building, over looking the water, swing dancing lessons were in full...swing.
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