Weekend of Ward: Why did 'Glow' blow?

“They convinced fifty thousand people to shove sand up their buttcracks for NOTHING!”

A man is screaming into his cell phone with the furor of someone who has been robbed or wrongly imprisoned. He sounds irate and violated. He is at Glow on the Santa Monica pier.

It’s 3 a.m. and I’m standing on the beach with several thousand people, looking for a reason to be here. The first ever free “Glow” event is mid-swing, and scheduled to last until 7a.m. The planned art installations, which were promised to be mind-blowing, trippy, luminescent and well, glowy, are conspicuously missing. Other than some grunion mating in the moonlight, the light-based attractions consist of little more than scattered Burning Man alumni with glowsticks wedged down their pants and the pier’s ferris wheel blinking in seizure-inducing patterns. We wander over to see some “volcanoes” only to find that they’re a dozen or so foot-high mounds of sand topped with Ikea votive candles. Really, people?

(At least there was a ferris wheel?) 

The scheduled DJ sets have apparently been cancelled due to a brawl breaking out earlier in the night, and now there’s not much to look at, other than other people. The crowd clogs the pier’s entrance, the shoreline is clustered with tens of thousands of people, and the line for funnel cake is staggering. I take an informal poll to find that approximately 50% of my surveyed subjects answer affirmatively when asked “Are you fucked up right now?” The other 50% shake their heads no, with a pang of sober regret.

Shuffling down Pico at 4 a.m., my cohort says in mock wonder “Maybe we were the art.”

What did you guys think: was it a poorly planned mess or an experiment in the futility of art? Or were you just too effed up to notice?