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By Root 797 0

up by blogs. A blog called Cheesebikini, run by a thirty-one-year-old graduate student in Berkeley named Sean Savage, gave the concept its name—“flash mobs”—as an homage to a 1973 science-fiction short story called “Flash Crowd,” by Larry Niven. The story is a warning about the unexpected downside of cheap teleportation technology: packs of thrill seekers can beam themselves in whenever something exciting is going down. The protagonist, Jerryberry Jensen, is a TV journalist who broadcasts a fight in a shopping mall, which soon, thanks to teleportation booths, grows into a multiday riot, with miscreants beaming in from around the world. Jensen is blamed, and his bosses threaten to fire him, but eventually he clears his name by showing how the technology was to blame. Since the mid-1990s, the term “flash crowd” had been invoked from time to time as a metaphor for the sudden and debilitating traffic surges that can occur when a small website is linked to by a very popular one. This is more commonly known as the “Slashdot effect,” after the popular tech-head site Slashdot.org, which was—and still is—known to choke the sites on which it bestows links.

With its meteorological resonance, its evocation of a “flash flood” of people mobbing a place or a site or a thing all at once and then dispersing, the term “flash mob” was utterly perfect. The phenomenon it described, now properly named, could venture out into the universe and begin swiftly, stylishly, assuredly to multiply.

HYPOTHESIS

The logic behind the Mob Project ran, roughly, as follows.

1. At any given time in New York—or in any other city where culture is actively made—the vast majority of events (concerts, plays, readings, comedy nights, and gallery shows, but also protests, charities, association meetings) are summarily ignored, while a small subset of events attracts enormous audiences and, soon, media attention.

2. For most of these latter events, the beneficiaries of that ineffable boon known as buzz, one can, after the fact, point out nominal reasons for their sudden popularity: high quality, for example; or perception of high quality due to general acclamation, or at least an assumption of general acclamation; or the participation of some well-liked figure, or the presence, or rumored presence, of same; etc.

3. But: so often does popularity, even among the highest of brow, bear no relationship to merit, that an experiment might be devised to determine just how far one might take the former while neglecting the latter entirely; that is, how much buzz one could create about an event whose only point was buzz, a show whose audience was itself the only show. Given all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, my thinking ran, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene—meaning the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work.

At its best, the Mob Project brought to this task a sort of formal unity, as can be illustrated in MOB #3, which took place fifteen days after #2. To get the slips with the destination, invitees were required to roam the downstairs food court of Grand Central Station, looking for Mob Project representatives reading the New York Review of Books. The secret location was a hotel adjacent to the station on Forty-second Street, the Grand Hyatt, which has a block-long lobby with fixtures in the high ’80s style: gold-chrome railings and sepia-mirror walls and a fountain in marblish stone and a mezzanine overhead, ringed around. Mob time was set for 7:07 p.m., the tail end of the evening rush hour; the train station next door was thick with commuters and so (visible through the hotel’s tinted-glass facade) was the sidewalk outside, but the lobby was nearly empty: only a few besuited types, guests presumably, sunk here and there into armchairs.

Starting five minutes beforehand the mob members slipped in, in twos and threes and tens, milling around in the lobby and making stylish small talk. Then all at once, they rode the elevators