Something went wrong, a little after midnight this weekend at St. Patrick's Basilica, which was packed with revelers for the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City.

Men in black-hooded sweatshirts stood solemnly on either side of the cathedral's aisles as artist Rashaad Newsome walked slowly between them toward the altar wearing a black-lacquered crown, the sounds of a live church choir resonating around him. Projected at giant size as a backdrop was a video montage of a woman dancing within a collage of jewels, money, and other symbols from hip-hop culture. When Newsome reached the stage, he knelt before another man in a hooded sweatshirt who touched his head lightly with a jewel-encrusted scepter. It was one of the most anticipated events in the all-night festival Flash:Light, presented as a subsection of the weekend's larger Festival.

The pews of the basilica were packed with people who had just removed their 3-D glasses after being mesmerized by a presentation of Marco Brambilla's "Civilization," a hallucinogenic montage saturated with iconic pop-culture images inspired by Dante's "Inferno." Viewers had been frustrated at the start of Newsome's piece, as the absorptive dreamscape of Brambilla's video was replaced by a giant-sized projection of a computer desktop. As hundreds of onlookers cringed in unison, whoever was in charge of the video moved a mouse about the screen, apparently trying to get things to work. (Had it been intentional, the spectacle might have actually been a brilliant commentary, taking the air out of Brambilla's hammy and operatic version of media art.) After things got back on track and proceeded to Newsome's mock coronation, a second video seemed to get frozen in a loop for too long. It was unclear whether the performance had come off, was paused in the middle or at an end, and so it all ended in a fizzle.

View Slideshow:

While hardly an exceptional occurrence, this media misfire left a bad enough aftertaste that Newsome is deliberately distancing himself from it. "What was seen at Nuit Blanche's Flash:Light was not an articulation of Rashaad Newsome's work," Max Levai of Marlborough Chelsea, which represents Newsome, told ARTINFO, "but instead a random mismatch of elements from an exciting performance that will be restaged in the near future." Had Newsome's piece been performed to completion, viewers would have seen vogue dancers take to the stage for a finale.

While the Newsome event was a disappointment, so much was going on that it was almost surprising that this was the only glitch in the evening's exhibitions. "We were trying to pull off a lot in one night," said Tom Peyton, one of the organizers of Flash:Light, which has taken place once before in 2010 in Greenpoint. And indeed, the festival was a feat of organization. Dozens of artists and organizations, including Rita Ackermann, Acconci Studio, and Marilyn Minter, were enlisted in the creation of the immersive nighttime environment in this patch of SoHo on Mulberry Street. Looking at a stretch of cityscape wrapped in a futuristic grid of blue light, one passerby was heard to remark, "It's like 'Bladerunner.'" Now there is a compliment.