So yesterday I was talking here again about the new arts center I'm trying to open, and was specifically comparing it to this student-run arts center I ran in college - how that too was an unusual plan for mixing the artistic community with the general public, how that too was laughed at by most of my friends until it was actually open, how that too ended up becoming this huge runaway success that no one besides me could've even guessed at when first hearing about it. And then I got a couple of emails reminding me that the vast majority of my current audience has no idea what I'm talking about, when I start talking about this arts center I started in college. So, ladies and gentlemen, I thought today we'd break out the Wayback Machine in order to give you the story of GALLERIA, perhaps the strangest and most fucked-up undergraduate art gallery in the history of the industry, that somehow managed to become a mainstream success despite itself.

The year was 1990, and I was a fine-art photography major at the University of Missouri-Columbia, after first spending almost four years being a political-science major. And a number of small things happen to have come together in the fall of 1990 at once, that ended up leading me to open an undergraduate arts center:

1) It was the beginning of my senior year, and I was feeling like a badass;

2) my friend Theodore (a creative-writing major, fellow acid-dropper and fellow Dada devotee, now the owner of an arts publication in Prague) and I moved into an apartment together, whch we had decided to turn into the most outrageously pretentious art-school apartment in the history of time - seriously, we even gave the apartment its own name, inspired by all the EM Forster books I was reading at the time, where houses didn't have mailing addresses but rather names like 'Howards End' and 'Hill on the Glen,' with our house of course named 'Kunstviesheisse,' German for 'art as shit;'

3) The previous year I had taken an independent-study course on performance art from noted Picasso scholar (and rumored Guerrilla Girl honcho) Dr. Karen Kleinfelder, where as part of my studies I had been required to produce two performance-art pieces of my own, which in my usual style I had turned into these giant public spectacles, inspiring mainstream press coverage and installing instant cult-hipster status on myself.

What this all meant for me, then, going into the fall of 1990, was that I was a senior about to enter my last year of school (theoretically, at least), living about as pretentious an undergraduate art-school lifestyle as possible, already with a cult hipster cred among my peers, and already with physical proof that the general public would embrace weirdo experimental art projects, if you simply sell it to them in the right way. And like all my fellow art students, I too was frustrated at being in this situation, because the art school at the University of Missouri was so small at the time that they didn't even have a campus gallery for student work and senior solo shows, almost a requirement among any art school that matters a damn. And sure, our student government ran an undergraduate gallery on the top floor of our student center - but since that was literally one of the only venues in the entire city for undergraduates to show their work, there was literally a two-year waiting list there to secure space for a senior show. (In other words, if you forgot to sign up at the beginning of your junior year, you were fucked by the end of your senior year.)

I was just coming off what I considered at the time a pretty impressive artistic feat - getting nearly 600 people to attend my first two public artistic projects ever, done at the age of 19 when absolutely not a single soul on the planet knew I was an artist - and I was naturally feeling cocky about the experience. I was convinced for the first time (certainly not the last) that there was a legitimate audience out there for creative work by unknown artists - I mean, I had convinced 600 strangers to attend my first two projects, which were both about as weird as they come, with not a single one of them knowing a single thing about either me or the projects themselves before attending. If I could do that, we certainly as a collective group could get this many people to regularly attend student artistic events, especially ones featuring a whole bevy of different artists.

So that's what I did - I started up a new organization called GALLERIA, dedicated to once a month putting on a multimedia artistic event featuring exclusively undergraduate work (with grad students occasionally invited to be a guest feature). And the very first thing I did was petition and successfully receive student-group status with our student government, which immediately gave us all these traditional things establishing credibility - a permanent mailbox in the student center, the right to advertise in dorm cafeterias and other off-limits campus areas, listings in all the official campus publications, etc.

My idea was a pretty simple one - instead of trying to secure our own physical space (which would've been almost impossible for a group of undergraduates), or holding our shows on-campus (another right we had as a student group), in cold, sterile meeting rooms, we would instead turn a local nightclub into our gallery once a month, with them keeping the bar tab and us keeping the door revenue ($1 cover). And this ended up working out quite well, because there was this one nightclub called the Blue Note that had this Wednesday night dance party, that was kicking all the other clubs' asses at the time, to the point that this other club called Shattered (our regular hangout) was simply closing on Wednesday nights because it was doing so little business. So I guaranteed them 200 customers if they'd let us set up an art gallery once a month there, and the owner laughed and said sure, he'd try it out once for the hell of it.

And granted, my friends thought I was insane for guaranteeing the owner that 200 thirsty people would show up for the first show; like I said, most of my friends didn't think even one edition of GALLERIA would end up being produced, and even if it did, there certainly wouldn't be any more people in attendance than the same 20 or 30 who attended receptions at the student-government gallery. And the method I came up with for picking featured artists wasn't exactly inspiring confidence either - I proposed that instead of a ridiculous jury system or other such pretentious nonsense you often see from student artistic groups, we simply have a "first come, first serve" policy, with the artists chosen being a direct reflection of who signed up first, and nothing else.

"Well, yeah," a typical comment would go back then. "But aren't you going to have a whole room full of shitty undergraduate work that way? If you're not prefiltering the quality, isn't it likely just going to be an entire gallery of crappy, obvious, pretentious student work?"

"Well, most of it will be," I would respond. "And then there'll be that one really amazing artist as well at each show, that just blows everyone there out of their socks. And then you'll end up going home that night not thinking about the 10 crappy student artists you saw, but that one great one you accidentally got exposed to. And then you'll think about what a great organization GALLERIA is, for exposing you to that great artist that you would've never otherwise gotten exposed to, instead of cursing us for exposing you to ten kinda crappy student artists. And then you'll come back next month to see what unknown new artist we've dug up this time."

"Uh, yeah, okay," they'd always say, rolling their eyes. "That sounds great and all. Good luck selling that to all the yokels in this godforsaken town."

But you know what? It worked. And I'm convinced that the reason it worked is the same reason this new arts center of mine is going to work, which is that we took a two-fisted approach to selling it to the public, using all our powers as a student organization to get the word out to the general public, while also using underground marketing to maintain our street cred among actual artists. For example, I was working at a copy shop at the time, so pretty much had access to an unlimited amount of flyers for GALLERIA. So we would print up one set of more traditional flyers on a given week, for example, fold them into little tents and place them on dorm cafeteria tables; then we would make another set that was a lot more smart-ass, and leave them in area coffeehouses and record stores. We did all kinds of things like this, to tell the truth, presenting the gallery in one way to one audience and another to another, while still being honest about the big picture in both cases (that is, pushing the idea that GALLERIA is where student artists and the general public come together, not just one group or the other).

It turned out, in fact, that everyone ended up loving the open-signup format - students loved not having to go through the elitist student-jury format, while the audience appreciated the egalitarian spirit it denoted. And so we ended up having a lot more students sign up for the first show than we were expecting - 17 visual artists, in fact, and another 10 or so for the live portion of the evening. Which then inspired the student newspaper to do a big write-up about GALLERIA a week before the first show, which then resulted in not 200 people attending but rather 250. And everyone ended up having such a good time that they all came back to the second show and brought their friends, giving us a total attendence of nearly 700 the second month.

And that was it, really - with things so firmly established at the beginning of it all, GALLERIA ended up becoming hugely successful throughout the one year of me at the head of it all - we ended up having a collective audience of something like 3,000 people over the course of ten shows, exhibited the portfolios of something like 110 artists, brokered three actual sales, inspired the formation of a new indie-rock band, and inspired the press to do something like 15 total features about us, not only print but radio and television as well. Oh, and we had all kinds of other random success stories as well - we had people road-tripping each month from St. Louis and Kansas City, just to attend the show; had a Pulitzer-nominated visiting-professor poet so impressed that he came and did a special performance one night; came to the attention of Links Hall in Chicago, because of Karen Kleinfelder (which at the time was the exclusive midwestern venue for such performance artists as Karen Finley, Henry Rollins and Eric Bogosian); had over 300 people attend my solo show at the student-government gallery that year, as a result of GALLERIA's notoriety. Oh, it just goes on and on, really.

There's a lot more to the GALLERIA story, to tell you the truth, that I'm running out of space to talk about here today - how I managed to get 30 art-school undergraduates to work as an egoless staff, how we dealt with "rebels" (that is, those art-school students who are simply determined to start a fight, no matter how little of a conflict actually exists), how the late-night social events at Kunstviescheisse that year were almost as necessary for GALLERIA's success as the monthly shows themselves. And you know, I haven't talked about GALLERIA in a number of years now, and it really is quite an entertaining thing for me to think back on all the craziness that year, so maybe soon I will sit down and tell you the rest of the story. But my main point today was simply to illustrate how I've been through all this before - how I have a history of coming up with cool new artistic projects, sometimes involving the coordinated efforts of dozens of people to pull off, many times ridiculed by the people around me for being completely unexecutable from the get-go, yet somehow all of them executed and most of them becoming much bigger successes than anyone ever imagined that they could be. And that's part of what gives me the confidence I have now concerning this new arts center, and my belief that it's going to be a runaway success when finally open.

Now, let's not forget, there are some truly memorable failures in there as well - my attempt at starting a Chicago Spoken Word Festival five years ago was a disaster, and my try at starting a new magazine in college went nowhere fast as well. But I don't mind occasionally failing, even if it's in a spectacular and public way, as long as I'm learning things from each experience - and much more importantly, at least attempting new things to begin with. I'd hate to get to the end of my life and have this whole list of things that make me say, "Damnit, I wish I had at least tried that." As long as I don't get to a point where I can say this, I will never mind the occasional spectacular public failure.

Well, I was supposed to finally get laid last night, for the first time in a year. And appropo to my weird-ass life, it was supposed to be with someone I met through Craigslist's "Casual Encounters," and it was supposed to be this crazy kinky thing involving two women and three men and a bunch of roleplaying and a whole hell of a lot of hot bi group sex. And this woman even called me on the phone, to prove she was real - in fact, she ended up calling me something like ten times in the six hours leading up to us getting together. And then should we all say it together now? The hour of her arrival finally came, and she suddenly disappeared, and of course can no longer be reached by either telephone or email.

I tells ya, people, what does a nice boy in Chicago have to do these days for a little casual sex? I mean, Jesus, am I going to have to pay a woman to sleep with me or something? ...Oh, wait a minute, that's something I could exactly do to get laid, couldn't I? No, no, do NOT send me Paypal donations for me to buy a prostitute, people! (I swear to God, sarcasm really is the most difficult thing out there to express through written word.) But, you know, if you've got some cute nerdy friend in Chicago, who's not that hung up about casual sex, you should definitely feel free to let her know about my existence. I'm just a person who's a little horny these days, who doesn't want to go through all the bullshit of traditional dating just to get laid once or twice. This used to not be such an unrectifiable situation, I swear!

When in doubt, people, always remember - another day I don't get laid is another day the terrorists have won. Do your duty as a patriot! Have more casual sex with your fellow Americans! Shock and awe, etcetera etcetera! Smoking people out and blowing their holes, such and such! Insert your own lame Bush-inspired sexual pun here! Get out there and do more fucking, people!