Not All That David Copperfield Kind of Crap

Comments (0) By Michael Leaverton Wednesday, Sep 1 2010

An art show that draws inspiration from The Catcher in the Rye and social media -- occurring at the dawn of another goddamn school year -- is best left in the hands of adolescents. At "Teen Age: You Just Don't Understand," curators Ken Goldberg and Catharine Clark have done just that, picking more than 10 works from a pool of 60 international submissions, with an eye toward Holden, high tech, and parental guidance -- all the artists are duly chaperoned. Allison Reilly, accompanied by Miguel Farias, gives us a teenager lying in bed at night, illuminated by her open MacBook, her face featureless in the blinding glare. Words from 100 Colma and Richmond teens show up in Metapuentes, which features doors inscribed with text-club dialogue. Maize Buchholz (11) and his grandmother (age withheld) prescribe Pills for Parents, a Facebook project featuring a dangling mobile hung with packages of pills for "overzealous parents." (Take a moment to think about this one -- where's Mom? -- and keep an eye out for the young Buchholz.) The show purposefully coincides with the tech-art blowout down south, ZER01's 01SJ Biennial: "Build Your Own World," which, depending how deeply you've drunk from the Boing Boing well, is full of hotshot visionaries or lousy with phonies. Either way, it's a swell name. It really is.