The Art of Parties: Downtown New York Cultural Scenes, 1978-1983

Kristen Galvin
Visual Studies
UC Irvine

This dissertation argues that Downtown scenes—across broadcast, nightlife, and academic spaces—are crucial to the shift between 1970s cultural pluralism and constructions of 1980s postmodernism. This project examines three different case studies as representative of Downtown scenes: Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, Club 57, and The Nova Convention. TV Party, intermittently cablecast from 1978-1982, depicted a chaotic collective of subcultures by promoting variety-style musical performance on one of the first live public access programs in Manhattan. Club 57, with its energetic queer performances, theme parties, art exhibitions, and film screenings, created an “anything goes” environment that provided a vital bridge between art school and a more professionalized career. An avant-garde “who’s who” of Downtown cultural history, The Nova Convention was a mega-conference that celebrated the work of William S. Burroughs to popularize critical theory in the United States. These three vibrant scenes supported production, collaboration, networking, and publicity for underground cultures and emerging artists. Downtown scenes shared progressive politics, taste cultures, and queer world-making desires to generate and rewrite cultural systems of meaning. In contrast to existing single-medium histories of this period, this project advances party scenes as particularly productive interdisciplinary configurations, with profound cultural and intellectual impact.