The New Millennial: Fortnight Launches at Robert Miller Gallery

LENNY KAYE PERFORMS AT LAST NIGHT’S FORTNIGHT LAUNCH
PHOTO COURTESY OF JAY CHEN

A meeting of generations took place last night at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea for the launch of Fortnight, a multimedia journal that aims to archive the manifold achievements of young contributors whose pursuits have been shaped by new media. There to support the journal was Lenny Kaye, who advised, “It’s a brave new world; the tools of production are in your hands.” He later performed “Dancing Barefoot”—not before joking, “This is a song Patti and I wrote in the 20th century.”

While conversation about the millennial cohort remains in fashion—the topic of editorials, the crux of countless blogs, the theme of recent conferences—what separates Fortnight is not only its commitment to the work of its generation, but also its appreciation for what came before. Luminary mentors respond, and Patti Smith, the “Patron Saint” of Fortnight, will be the first. Adam Whitney Nichols and Samantha Hinds, the journal’s Creative Director and Editor, respectively, have envisioned a forum that will counter the criticism and apprehension of the “Peter Pan Generation” and its “failure to launch.” The site’s sleek design, contributor interviews, and multimedia content chronicles a fourteen-day cycle that brings to pass today’s young minds (like singer-songwriter Zane Alan McWilliams) with legendary artists like Smith and Kaye, whose rendition of “the national anthem of rock-‘n’-roll,” “Gloria”—to a crowd of mixed generations in a room of Basquiat screen-prints and Mapplethorpe photographs—seemed all too apt.