Yesterday, a friend of mine who recently started his MA at Columbia invited me to attend a Columbia student art thing at the Brooklyn Lyceum. The venue itself gave me high hopes and the $10 all you can drink entry fee was enticing.

The event was named Collision NYC and described as “an annual underground multimedia art exhibition executed and organized by students for students.” You can also read this as “we think we’re artists but for some reason nobody wants to exhibit us so we’re just gonna do it ourselves.”

The group putting on the event claim to be “independent from a specific University-sponsored club” but they’re definitely all from the same university. The uptown one, ya know. Apparently, their desire for downtown street cred goes so far that they have events as far as possible from their own campus. Quick, somebody tell them Bay Ridge is cool.

The “art” included the black and white, 8×10 ‘arty’ pictures of my friends smoking cigarettes, 10th grade illustrations, late-night drunken lovesick scribbled notes with some key words emphasized in black marker, four girls who think they’re dancers doing some performance piece in matching skirts, armpit-haired guitar girl singing self-described “sad songs” (give me a BREAK!), and the band with 19 year old front man wearing sunglasses crooning lyrics such as “she was only 17.”

Admittedly, there were two or three interesting/talented artists but their talent was sadly overwhelmed by the incredible mediocrity and plain badness of the rest of the show.

Plus, being around so many Columbia undergrads gives me hives. Lesson learned: Don’t go to any event the description of which includes the words “Columbia” and “art.” It’s bound to be a disaster.