Art for Nobody's Sake: The 59th Street Bridge Anonymous
Someone hung a spectacular photography exhibition on the approach to the 59th Street Bridge and didn't bother signing it. That's not a curatorial oversight—that's a middle finger to the entire art economy.
These prints—crisp, large-format, easily 12x18 inches on quality stock—are not the work of an amateur. And they’re not some .jpgs knocked out on someone’s home printer. No, this show took an investment of time, talent and money.
The photographs themselves span fashion, portraiture, and surrealism: women in dramatic poses (that red outfit against crimson, the ballet dancer, figures in leaves), a striking black-and-white image of a figure in a zebra mask, and a haunting double-exposure portrait with dots marking the faces. None of the images would look out of place in a Chelsea gallery.
The only marking I could find on any of them is a scrawled signature with the notatoin "1/100 2018," suggesting an edition. Someone made a hundred of these.
No gallery takes fifty percent. No collector haggles over price. No curator writes incomprehensible wall text. No Instagram geotag farming engagement. The work simply exists at one of Manhattan's grittiest thresholds—that concrete zone where the city exhales toward Queens—available to anyone walking past. Truck drivers. Schoolkids. Tourists hunting the tram. People who'd never set foot in a gallery get museum-quality prints at eye level.
This is art stripped of careerism's suffocating embrace. No artist statement explaining what you're supposed to feel. No press release. No opening with cheap wine. Just images doing what images do: existing, communicating, eventually weathering away. The photographer made a real investment to give this work to nobody in particular, which is to say everybody.
