The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

One of the earliest art feature stories I ever wrote, in 1998, was about the (very common) civic practice of exploiting artists. Here’s how it works:

1. Take a blighted or economically diminished section of your favorite city, preferably with a wide array of large warehouse or mixed-use industrial buildings;
2. Inherit, steal, or buy up a bunch of real estate in said blighted area;
3. Invite people who have few other options for finding cheap urban real estate—namely, artists—to inhabit your warehouses and old factories;
4. Watch the artists turn your blighted area into a hip area where lots of young, up-and-coming people hang out;
5. Watch new businesses like galleries, art stores, cafes, restaurants, and so on develop in formerly empty spaces;
6. Kick the artists out of your buildings, sell to investors at a huge profit, retire fat, happy, and with a spotless conscience.

I wrote my story about Northeast Minneapolis, just north of the downtown of Minneapolis, which, back then, was the hub of arts activities in the Twin Cities. Here’s a sampling of the crux of the story:

Roughly defined as the Central Avenue corridor running between 3rd and 37th avenues, Northeast Minneapolis has historically been a confluence of working-class residences, light-industrial parks, warehouses, and low-rent retail shops. At present, several art galleries (including Acme Visual Arts and Icebox Gallery) and a number of large studio complexes (including the S & M Tire Warehouse, the Tyler Street Studio Building, the California Building, and the Northrup King Studio Complex) can be found around the Central Avenue corridor, where the low-rent warehouse and industrial spaces began to attract artists and gallery owners about 10 years ago….

….Although Northeast Minneapolis is arguably the art center of the Twin Cities these days, that distinction may be ending as the neighborhood evolves. Like AØSO, two other Northeast galleries have closed in the last six months, and another in the last year. At the same time, rising rents and new neighborhood development threaten to displace some of the artist occupants of warehouse studio spaces.

Of course, this story is not unique to Minneapolis. It’s been going on for ages all over the country. (The cycle has repeated in the Twin Cities at least once more since I wrote the story in 1998.) This book, for example, tells the story of the rise and fall of the great arts colony in Manhattan’s SoHo district. And this was way back in the 1960s, before they’d even invented urban blight!

And, as you’d expect in this great age of Artistic Failure, this story continues to play today—except now, as this story by David Freedlander in Am New York relates, the cycle of artistic exploitation-rejection can encompass entire major metropolitan areas.

The story starts by quoting Robert Elmes, who recently very nearly moved his gallery, Galapagos Art Space, out of New York (to the more favorable climes of Berlin):

“The cultural ecosystem is under incredible threat right now,” Elmes said. “The word spreading back across the country to young, creative people is that New York is incredibly expensive and there isn’t the opportunity to experiment with new work. The best and the brightest are going to other cities.”

It’s a common refrain among those who work in the creative industries and follow the cultural scene closely: New York City, which has incubated a century of the world’s leading artists, musicians, and performers, will cease to be a place where art is made.

“New York could easily become a museum city like Paris or Rome that doesn’t produce much in the way of relevant culture,” Elmes said. “If you take emerging and cutting-edge arts away, the city becomes dramatically less interesting. That was always what New York was about but we are not protecting our brand.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Exploiting artists, Ah New York..., Misunderstanding the artist's life, Decline of human culture, Artistic failure in America, Doomed artist, Overcoming Artistic Failure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.