The New Museum's "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" Exhibit

Long before 1993, a Yale-trained lighting designer told me her theory about how the arts world chooses its dates for retrospective exhibits and shows. "It's the 20-year rule," she hypothesized. Over adult beverages, we couldn't come to agreement on why the public found this time frame fascinating. Our acquaintance faded over time; for the record, we last spoke to one another well over two decades ago.

A detail of work by Pepon Osorio at NYC 1993
(photo: The New York Times)

I recalled the designer's observation as I read an Associated Press story about the NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star exhibit currently at New York's New Museum. The show uses the device of Manhattan's remaining, working pay phones to relay oral history about Gotham circa 1993. That sly spirit might be the exhibit's best point. Meanwhile, the exhibit organizers are keenly conscious of NYC 1993's publicity value, as its "guest speakers" on the pay phones' recorded comments include TV chef Mario Batali, actor Chaz Palmenteri, and former porn star Robin Byrd. Sorry, none of the late Leona Helmsley's "little people" need apply.

The AP article asserts 1993 was a "pivotal year in the city's art, culture and politics." The story does not support this statement with episodes that would have demonstrated a "before" and "after" effect. I'm hard pressed to think of any event in New York City that had such impact as the AP story glibly accepts.

Well, on second thought, the AP piece does mention then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's allegedly "get tough" strategy on crime. That policy essentially hassled minorities, drove the homeless either underground or out of the city, increased tolerance for barely-legal police surveillance, and set the stage for the Disneyfication of Times Square. Twenty years later, New York has become much more of a city segregated and stratified by class rather than race. This phenomenon was recorded without irony in the popular Sex and the City series. Even as unlikely a source as Mario Batali notes in his New Museum exhibit comments that it's just about impossible for a restaurant to open in 2013 New York without enormous financial backing. Other businesses face similar, daunting obstacles to operating in the city that never sleeps.

The New Museum show does offer the benefit of driving thought about just what exactly changed in New York City in the past generation. Clearly, the World Trade Center disaster remains seared on the city's consciousness. Like the drug addicts that Giuliani supposedly drove from the streets, Gotham is now more dangerously dependent than it was twenty years ago on riches flowing into Wall Street. The Bernie Madoff scandal showed how deeply the financial corruption degraded a once-proud city's elite. There are two new baseball stadiums with seating far fewer can afford, a new pro basketball playpen in Brooklyn to house a Russian oligarch's new toy, and a revamped tennis stadium essentially maintained for an annual, highly commercialized celebration of aspirational desires and class values. At least the Staten Island Ferry is free. Its view of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty remains one of the world's best deals and a reminder of what might still be possible -- if we could only believe in it.