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February 17, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > Museum revokes tradition to invite dancing, hip-hop

Museum revokes tradition to invite dancing, hip-hop

By Bryce Gray | Thresher staff

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is usually the perfect place to kill time on a quiet weekend. It is easy to spend hours wandering through the galleries’ pristine hallways, losing yourself among priceless works of painting and sculpture. Unless your visit coincides with a lecture or a wayward middle school field trip, the MFAH is dominated by dense, echoing silence.

This silence was shattered Saturday. The thump of oversized subwoofers and the scratch of spinning turntables reverberated through the museum’s main gallery. The main hall of the museum’s Caroline Wiess Law Building underwent a one-night, Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, turned upside down for the final installment of the Beats of Basquiat.

A surreal scene greeted me as I entered the museum 15 minutes before the velvet ropes went down for the public. Bartenders in black shirts and black ties primed coolers full of Bud Light, while an army of Starbucks employees in green aprons and visors readied their espresso machines and coffee-dispensing backpacks. Projectors lit up the huge walls in the hurriedly emptied lower gallery, pointing to bathrooms, acknowledging sponsors and playing flippant, plot-free videos to accompany the blaring hip-hop.

When the doors finally opened, the crowd snaked in and spread up the stairs onto the makeshift dance floor of the lower gallery. A disk jockey’s booth reigned over the evening from upstairs by the exhibit. The turntable stand overlooked the dance floor and served as a makeshift pulpit perfect for delivering music to an eager congregation of hip-hop-heads and hipsters. The opening DJ spun a mixture of 1980s pop and new wave in obvious anticipation of the night’s headliner, hip-hop pioneer Grand Master Flash.

Even after the doors opened at 8 p.m., a mob assembled outside in the evening chill. Hopeful partiers thronged around the block long after the museum closed off entry at about 11 p.m. Despite the sheer number of scenesters left out in the cold, the museum’s temporary club scene pulsed beyond capacity — a few thousand people found their way in before the doors shut.

The gigantic horde of partiers was surprisingly diverse and more than a little bizarre. B-boys in Adidas jumpsuits looked on with crossed arms while punk rockers admired each other’s tattoos and tapered jeans. Swarthy teenagers who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Growing up Gotti prowled around in packs a few feet away from pencil-thin soccer moms clinking martini glasses. There were even a few nuclear families walking hand-in-hand. And the indie elite was out in full force — a familiar group of thrift-store aficionados oblivious to the irony of trading repartee beneath a giant Starbucks logo.

Many in attendance looked like they had never set foot inside the museum, but there was a comforting touch for the museum’s members: The MFAH’s familiar staff of elderly security guards was on hand to keep order. They stood in their customary corners, watching in a mixture of anger, fear and disgust.

It was not hard to understand their concern — drunken dancers stumbled perilously close to irreplaceable Jean-Michel Basquiat originals. The exhibit itself was largely ignored in favor of the dance floor. However, Basquiat’s chaotic self-portraits and colorful scribblings lent a touch of sophistication to the club-like atmosphere.

When Grand Master Flash finally appeared at 11 p.m., the assembled mass erupted with a roar of approval. A live video feed projected on the wall followed his progress from the bowels of a parking garage to his rightful place behind the turntables. After delivering a few choice instructions to his public — “1. When I ask you to put your mother-fucking hands in the air, put them up, 2. Make some noise, 3. Shake your mother-fucking ass with me” — Grand Master Flash started the party with Naughty by Nature’s mid-1990s hit “Hip Hop Hooray.”

For the next three hours, Flash spun records without pause while video jockeys projected lights and animations on the lower gallery walls. The Starbucks employees might have run out of complimentary lattes and the bartenders might have run out of vodka, but the Beats of Basquiat refused to run out of steam. The disconcerted smokers sitting outside the museum today are probably still trying to catch their breath after dancing.

Twenty short hours after the MFAH shooed the last drunks away from the bar, the exhibit closed and moved on to Los Angeles. But while the trash has been cleaned up and the paintings re-hung, it will not be easy to forget the night the tranquil silence of Houston’s most prestigious gallery evaporated, lost in the sounds of the club.

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