Their Night/Day at the Museum

Ten years ago, Agathe Snow, a darling of the downtown New York art scene, gave a 24-hour party. More than 300 artists and creative types gathered to dance in a grimy loft on Ann Street in Lower Manhattan that was still tinged by the Sept. 11 attack. Ms. Snow filmed the entire affair.

Last Thursday night, Ms. Snow tried resurrecting the party, though in a very different setting. A 24-hour film culled from the 2005 event was projected onto a wall at the Guggenheim Museum. And about 900 people were invited to spend 24 hours in the landmark rotunda, reliving a moment in time, wedged between the World Trade Center attack and the Great Recession, that Ms. Snow refers to as the “Manic Depression.”

In the end, it wasn’t so much a resurrection as a curated homage. Carmen Hermo, an assistant curator at the museum, said the early evening felt more like a typical Guggenheim party, with the fashion crowd and assorted scenesters dancing to the bands TV Baby and Onyx Collective, among others.

It was also a reunion of sort. Artists at the original party, including Dan Colen, Nate Lowman and Ryan McGinley, were there, perhaps to catch a glimpse of their younger selves.

But they were mostly gone by 4 a.m., when the cash bar transitioned from cocktails to juice and croissants. About 50 partygoers remained, including eight who were sleeping in one corner of the rotunda, still wearing their sequined party clothes. With Nicki Minaj blaring from the speakers, some couples were spooning, others took selfies, and an enthusiastic crowd of teenagers kept going on the dance floor.

“The past five or six hours have been absolutely amazing,” said Marc Rosenberg, 17, a college student from Suffern, N.Y.

By the bar, Tiffani Argentina, 26, who described herself as an art student, bartender and performer, was less impressed. “I thought people would get crazy,” said Ms. Argentina, who arrived around 2 a.m. after working at a bar in Brooklyn. “I thought it would be like the party in the old days.”

Much has changed since the original party. Ms. Snow, now 39, has lost a handful of friends and her former husband, the artist Dash Snow, who died in 2009. For her, reliving an earlier life brought “happy tears,” she said. “Like a survivor kind of thing.”

As 5 a.m. approached, Ms. Snow could be found on the dance floor, fresh from a shower she took at a nearby hotel. Dressed in an oversize sweater, shorts and sandals, she danced near two teenagers dressed almost identically in button-down shirts and blue pants. If she had to give a name to this moment in time, she said, she would call it “Youth, Revisited.”

The dancing continued through 10 a.m., when the doors opened to the public, and visitors who paid the $25 admission could join the fun.