Why I Believe New York's Art Scene Is Doomed

http://news.artnet.com/art-world/why-i-believe-new-yorks-art-scene-is-doomed-214970

by bdr • 12 years ago

35 56 12 years ago

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If you felt eye strain while reading this, you can blame the `letter-spacing: 1px`. Friends, don't let friends bump the letter-spacing of body text!

Retra• 12 years ago

It looks nice if you're not reading it! :P

lisa_henderson• 12 years ago

About this:

"I think we may be coming to the end of a period where being an artist was synonymous with being urban, unless we are willing to fight for it—but before I start it, let me say that I have mixed feelings about my own conclusions."

The great art scenes tend to emerge in great urban centers that are going through an economic crisis. That is why New York's art scene was so hot back when "white flight" was in the news -- when all the whites moved the suburbs, and New York almost defaulted on its debt, then New York was a the world capitol of art. That was an era when New York had low rents.

Artists need 2 things that rarely come together: a concentration of cultural capital/amenities plus low rent. A growing city with a thriving industrial base rarely produces a great art scene. It's when the crisis hits, and therefore rents are low, that the art scene flourishes. Many of the great "golden ages" of art arose at a time when urban centers were already in decline. Much of what we think of as the Italian Renaissance happened after 1492, when the trade routes suddenly shifted to the Atlantic, and the Italian city-states saw their trade erode. Likewise, the Spanish golden age, in art, occurred after the shipments of gold and silver, from the New World, went into decline.

For the last 20 years we've seen cities such as Berlin emerge as great art scenes, and again, they follow the same pattern: the struggle to integrate the old Communist regions into the rest of Germany has proceeded with painful slowness, and Berlin offers a great cultural center with low rents (certainly low compared to New York, though rents in Berlin have been rising quite a lot).

The emergence of a thriving software scene in New York certainly puts pressure on the art scene in New York. It's possible that the center of art in the USA will find a new home. There are many cities in the USA that are still facing economic crisis and therefore offer low rents. New Orleans, Asheville and many other regional centers have incipient art scenes and low rents. Maybe one of them will evolve toward being the arts center in the USA? But of course, we live in a globalized world, so it is possible that a place like Berlin could emerge as the favored location for USA artists.

elliptic• 12 years ago

Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London, and Quattroceno Florence all had astonishing concentrations of artistic vitality; none of those were in economic decline.

percept• 12 years ago

Yes, that proximity seems important.

A Des Moines story made the rounds here recently, and David Byrne wrote about this (in relation to NYC):

http://davidbyrne.com/des-moines

I thought they were already complaining about the rent in Asheville! (Though it's all relative.)

stock_toaster• 12 years ago

Would you then predict that Detroit will become a center for the arts, or has it fallen too far behind in basic services already?

badsock• 12 years ago

This perspective makes me hopeful for things like basic income. Highly arguable, I know, but to me this is evidence of what people (in aggregate) do when they don't have to work so much to provide for basic survival: they create culture.

theoh• 12 years ago

Reading "I think we may be coming to the end of a period where being an artist was synonymous with being urban" the first thing I noticed was the unorthodox use of the word "synonymous". Davis' use could be read as stating that everyone urban was an artist during the period in question, which is an absurd and pedantic reading, but it may reveal his preoccupations.

stegosaurus5• 12 years ago

The same is happening in London, UK at the moment; though it's something that cuts further than just art.

The capital and the surrounding regions are now practically unaffordable for anyone other than well-remunerated professional workers and those who got in early.

One thing I find odd about the article is the focus on 'being urban', though.

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? In the UK that is not true at all in my experience, country living here is aspirational and generally a sign of wealth.

What we have is not really an 'inversion' of white flight; rather, the city _and_ the suburbs are becoming wealthier whilst the poor move away from the capital to surrounding cities (or try desperately to cling on).

Then again, what constitutes a 'suburb' is radically different here!

sebular• 12 years ago

Yes, living in the rural United States is far cheaper than living in any major city. Realize that the continental US is over 33 times the size of the UK, but only has about 5 times the population. There just isn't any competition for property out in the "middle of nowhere".

stegosaurus5• 12 years ago

Well, the main reason rural housing in the UK is expensive is due to planning restrictions rather than a simple matter of landmass.

Agricultural / 'amenity' land can cost a few thousand pounds for an acre.

The historical reasons for such sit on my reading list...

forkandwait• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Very much so, but it is hard to find professional work in truly rural places (less than 20,000 with no big job source like a university or a capital).

However, I think the sweet spot in the US are either small towns with a county population of about 300k population with a research university or the (even better) small to midsize cities like Austin, Portland (both), Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, etc.

Just riffing, FWIW

sliverstorm4• 12 years ago

Of course, you don't necessarily have to find "professional" work. I know a few small-time ranchers who raise sheep and alpaca on modest plots of land, for example.

jzwinck• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Yes, sort of.

You can find housing much cheaper outside the cities. Some services are cheaper, though not if you are "too rural," so the rest of what I write here will apply more to suburbia and semi-rural areas and not the truly "out there" rural places (where few people live anyway).

There are problems with living outside major cities, though. Work is often harder to come by, and pays less too. Companies justify this by saying the cost of living is lower, but this only makes sense for the fraction of your income you actually spend while living there. If you move out later to a more expensive area, you're in trouble because you were being paid at the "low cost of living" rate all along. On the other hand if you spend everything you earn (or more), having a low cost of living is good.

A second problem is much more acute in the UK than the US: cost of transportation. Gas, cars, and regional trains are somewhat affordable in the US, whereas in the UK they are quite a bit more expensive. National Rail fares have increased faster than inflation in many recent years, resulting in protests just two weeks ago [1]. For example, an annual pass from Tring to London, which takes 1'15", now costs about 6000 USD. That's a significant reason why living way outside London is not that cheap despite the inconvenience.

sliverstorm4• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Tremendously so, if you are prepared to live that way. Rural houses are generally very cheap.

You've got to live a bit dirtier, perhaps with an outhouse and a well and some chickens, and you have to figure out what you are doing for a living. But in the US, if you are too poor for wherever you are living, I'm pretty sure you can just move further away from the city.

A huge chunk of the US looks like this:

http://www.culinaryanthropologist.org/photos/Smtanya0001.JPG

http://nebula.wsimg.com/98a9d952e9d4c36a0af32e562e73701e?Acc...

http://gallery.usgs.gov/images/12_01_2011/bfv2YmkXXS_12_01_2...

I don't know all the zoning rules, but when you are 200 miles from the nearest sheriff, I don't think people get too picky.

seanmcdirmid3• 12 years ago

This is so wrong in many ways. Some of your costs go down, but your means of earning money go down also. Also, there is a cost to having poor infrastructure in health as well as money (septic tanks ain't cheap, burning your trash out back will give you cancer), forget about public transit, you have to have a car. Better to be poor in a city, where there could at least be some services to help out, and at least the infrastructure is there and relatively cheap. And finding a job is a possibility.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Outhouse? The last home outhouse around here went out in the 60's. Rural Iowa is where I live. We have had plumbing, the REC, mail deliver etc for half a century.

As for where I work? Well, in San Jose right now - I work remotely for a Silicon Valley startup. Have for 20 years, one after another.

Is it cheap? Pretty much so. 80 acres and built a house for a couple hundred thousand. Worth a lot more now since I live near a college town, but just move south 20 miles and still land is around $1000/acre.

wyager• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Absolutely. You're probably not going to land a high-paying professional job, but there's always manual labor to be done, the cost of living is generally very low, and the lifestyle is typically healthier than in cities.

I've lived in many cities ranging from 1,400 people to 20,000,000 people, and the trend is the same everywhere I've lived. There is much less destitute poverty in small American towns, and there is much greater class mobility.

I'm sure the UK is different because it has almost 7.5 times the population density of the US. The US is huge. Most Europeans can't properly appreciate how large it is. If you go out in the countryside, even very poor people are likely to have a few acres of land that they own outright. Countryside land may be valuable in the UK, but here in the US it's dirt cheap. That's not to say wealthy people don't own rural land. I'm currently living in Texas, and it's common for the wealthy to possess a smaller urban residence and a larger rural residence, often with tens or hundreds of acres of private land. It's possible to get hundreds of acres for a few million USD.

_delirium• 12 years ago

much less destitute poverty in small American towns, and there is much greater class mobility.

Eh, this really varies by region. I've driven through a number of small American towns with housing that doesn't look particularly first-world, people living in stuff like shacks with corrugated-tin roofs and half the windows filled with plywood. Rural Louisiana and Mississippi are particularly sad looking, as well as some of the more remote areas of Appalachia, and parts of coastal and south Texas. The class mobility in these areas consists mostly of younger people looking for a way to get out.

refurb• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? Yes, sort of.

It can be significantly cheaper yes.

A friend of mine works for a pharma company in SE Michigan. The job pays him ~$200K with bonus for good years. Michigan has a flat 4% state income tax.

A new, 2000 sq. ft. house in the nice part of town is $150K ($800 mortgage with 20% down). The schools are great due to the solid tax base and plenty of highly educated parents. You can buy a nice 1960's bungalow for $100K. A big house (4000 sq. ft.) on a couple acres would run you $350K.

It's not a bad setup if you can find it.

bane• 12 years ago

When I was buying my last house (in boring suburbia), for fun, my wife and I looked around the U.S. at what our money would buy in other places.

In L.A. it bought an empty lot with a rusting fence around it, perhaps 10m x 20m in size.

In NYC, a similar story, but the lot was smaller and had lots of rubbish you had to remove.

and so on...

So for fun we looked "out in the country". One listing has stuck in both our minds, it was an aerial photograph of a some dense forest and a few houses on it. We didn't get it, which house was this for? We reread the listing several times to eventually parse the description and realized that it was for all of it. 140acres (56.6hectares) with 4 homes and 2 other structures.

The only way the listing agent could get a picture of the property was to get in an aircraft and take it from above.

We almost toyed with the idea of moving there, but an extreme lack of jobs in our field (and low pay) kept us away. But it's tucked in our hats as a retirement option down the road.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? In the UK that is not true at all in my experience, country living here is aspirational and generally a sign of wealth.

Is it really more expensive, or is it just difficult to afford to live there because of the lack of employment opportunities?

stegosaurus5• 12 years ago

It's really more expensive unless we're using a different definition of rural.

Or rather, it's either impossible or expensive. Land with planning permission for dwellings is expensive. If there are fields as far as the eye can see, land will be cheap but you won't get permission to build on it.

I am unsure if the same applies to very remote areas (e.g. Scottish Highlands) but I've not seen evidence to the contrary.

Ignoring work entirely and assuming you can keep place with inflation via investments, 250K GBP would likely be enough to buy a home in a poor urban neighbourhood and exist there in perpetuity, reading or coding or doing whatever non-profitable activity you desire. Home would cost 50-75K, 3% on the rest would keep your utilities and food going.

This might be doable in a remote village (not within commuting distance of a major city) but not rural proper like some of the pictures that have been posted of farmhouses out in the middle of nowhere here. The land and property alone would be hundreds of thousands.

nether3• 12 years ago

Are there any affordable but safe neighborhoods in Detroit where one can live carless? I used to live in Ann Arbor but it was anything but affordable (I'm paying less rent living in the Los Angeles area within walking distance to the beach).

tomphoolery• 12 years ago

There are many affordable and safe neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

ebiester2• 12 years ago

Carless, affordable, and safe?

nether3• 12 years ago

How much for a 1-bedroom?

Dwolb• 12 years ago

Perhaps search for Woodbridge. It's safer due to proximity to Wayne State, but still borders low income housing projects. The neighborhood is known for all the buzzwords that are making Detroit cool these days (e.g. urban gardening, art crawls, bicycle slow rolls, etc.)

jrapdx3• 12 years ago

On the other side of the continent, my own observations are remarkably similar. The same pattern has been happening here in Portland (Oregon) for at least the last 30 years.

Wherever artists congregate, whichever quarter of the region, pretty soon the affluent declare it a "cool" place to live, real estate prices skyrocket and artists can't afford it. Obviously this affects most living there, few can afford to stay.

So yes, I've said it many times. Why is the city so determined to turn itself into the suburb we city dwellers wanted to avoid?

Though I am an artist, I'm not poor. I have the means to continue living near the center of town, but I'm beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of staying here.

owen_griffiths• 12 years ago

Seems to me, if the artists being present was the real source of the "cool", then pricing them out would cause the "cool" to reduce, and a balance would form.

ebiester2• 12 years ago

This is tangental, but why aren't we building new cities? We keep on adding population. We have realized that people under 30 don't want to live in the suburbs. We have realized that poor and rich alike don't really like the suburban model.

However, the current set of cities are constrained. We can't really build out, and public transportation has been found to be a must. Cars aren't the solution in high density living. As such, we need new land.

Import artists. Bring along tech. Have artisans build some great buildings.

It would only take 50 square miles, some coastline, and some water rights. Why isn't this the time to be bold?

wdewind• 12 years ago

In the history of humanity the "build it and they will come" method of creating cities has not yielded great results. Take a look at Brasilia, or China's ghost cities.

TYPE_FASTER• 12 years ago

It's a chicken and egg problem: it's hard to artificially create centers of population density. China is doing it, with mixed results, because they can just relocate people.

It's not as much building new cities, but expanding cities. One of the reasons for Manhattan's "success" as a city is it's physically constrained, so developers build up, so population density increases.

All the development happening in the Seaport area of Boston is a good example. The Fort Point area, just north of the Seaport, was an artist enclave until recently, when people were priced out of the city and buildings started flipping in Fort Point. Now, there are multiple luxury high rises being built on the water, and tech companies are moving into the area.

Artists moving to Detroit will happen, but it will take a lonnnnng time to gentrify the city, just like it took decades to bring NYC from what it was in the 1970s to now.

pjbrunet2• 12 years ago

- If there's more data showing that artists help improve a community's quality of life, I think that's important data to share. The author figures that's a given (and I agree) but I don't think the general public gets it yet. If you roll out the red carpet, create spaces for artists, treat artists with respect, you might attract more artists. (Instead of harassing them, which is common.) However, what kind of artists will you get? You need a strategy.

- There's the whole issue of the Internet that the article doesn't really cover. Not that long ago, New York artists had to wait for the latest styles to get from Paris to New York by ship. Today, location is not as much an issue. If your work is remarkable and you can get a good photo uploaded to the Internet, who cares where you are? New York artists are a dime a dozen. If you're somewhere exotic, that could work to your advantage. Years ago I read an article about galleries closing in favor of more intimate, private viewing spaces where you could make an appointment to see and purchase something you saw online. (Assuming you need to see it in person before purchasing.) So the fancy street address is no longer as important to sell art. And Art Basel (and similar events) make New York less relevant too.

jacobolus• 12 years ago

Why does the author need to care about “a community’s quality of life” as some kind of abstract ideal, or collect data about it? What “community” are we talking about? If it’s the community of artists and other weird/interesting people, then of course having other similar people around improves the community’s quality of life, since that’s what the community is.

Do artists improve the quality of life of a community of bankers? Who knows, and who cares?

pjbrunet2• 12 years ago

The assumption underlying the whole article: property values rise because a neighborhood is "cool" and appealing, because artists live there. (And then artists must leave because they can't afford rent.) There is data showing that's true, but I don't think there's any general consensus yet. (So more people can understand what the article is talking about.) Rising property values, the cool factor, the vibe, beautiful people, whatever you want to call the thing that attracts people to an artsy area. I called it "quality of life" but yes an abstract concept, I was deliberately vague because that's hard to define. I think people do care, which is why they spend good money to move to these neighborhoods. Also the artists care because they want credit for what they helped create.

hodwik3• 12 years ago

New York hasn't been a legitimate art scene for ages.

To the down-voters, I'd love to hear you name a significant art movement to specifically come out of NYC in the last 30 years.

Chevalier• 12 years ago

As someone who's lived in New York a long time... this argument is ridiculous.

New York IS cheap. If Williamsburg is too expensive, go another subway stop out to Bushwick. If that's too expensive, go another subway stop out. Take an extra ten minutes on the subway and enjoy thousands of dollars off your monthly rent.

NYC is absolutely enormous, and there are parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have grown CHEAPER over the past few decades. Admittedly, that's because the criminal elements of NYC have been concentrated there... but cheap is cheap.

NYC is unique among American cities in that our subway infrastructure allows ENORMOUS expansion of affordable housing in virtually every direction at no financial expense and almost no sacrifice in time. It's cheap as hell to live in the South Bronx, for example, and you'll get anywhere in Manhattan relatively quickly. San Francisco simply doesn't have the same flexibility, since the transit there is so god-awful by comparison.

Artists don't get to live in the Upper West Side just because "art!" Go live in edge neighborhoods, of which there are plenty. If you want to complain that neighborhoods are increasingly less walkable and more dilapidated the further out you go... lobby to allow developers to build new, dense buildings out there. The only solution to expensive housing is to build more housing.

Ollinson3• 12 years ago

For me Roosevelt Avenue in Queens between Jackson Heights and Junction Blvd on a 80F day is the real NYC. People of every ethnicity on the street, everyone in the shade of the elevated 7 train, street vendors selling everything and thousands of people strolling along.

Rents are cheap here but it is not glamorous and in some areas even borderline dangerous (around Corona, especially at night). People in Manhattan and trendy parts of Brooklyn don't realize it but they're paying high rents for safety. Gentrification brings police protection and in my area of Queens you're not going to see cops on that dark corner at 1AM like you would in Williamsburg.

There are many neighborhoods in The Bronx and Brooklyn that are still like this but people don't feel comfortable living there.

areed• 12 years ago

I find the modesty in the title of this article refreshing. Most editors would have yanked "I Believe" to garner more clicks.

tomlock2• 12 years ago

The "war" on gentrification has in my experience been one of the most passive and apathetic wars, and like the article says, its mostly the first wave of gentrifiers that complain about it. In university, the local anti-gentrification movement formed food co-ops and local community groups, and hung out in tiny coffee shops with local art on the walls. I always felt like their passive, unknowing contribution to attracting further gentrification was greater than any resistance to it.

mc32• 12 years ago

The article also assumes artists are the main agents of change as if without them change would not happen. I would not be so sure about that -- I think its more that they happen to be artists but they could easily be students or any other spearhead of change which might pave the way for followers. The force making housing unaffordable in silicon valley is not artists but tech workers and everyone else trying to find a ride on that economic wave...

Anyway its all part of bigger forces, economic, social, demographic, etc.

Ollinson3• 12 years ago

The artsy waterfront areas that are now gentrified were originally large dilapidated work lofts that were not really intended for residents. Many of them lacked bathrooms or kitchens. There is a really good new york times article from the late 1980s that talks about how residents coped with the lack of such basic amenities (I can't find it now but I used it previously in an essay).

Rezoning paved the way for true residential housing and with that came the high prices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg,_Brooklyn#Gentrifi...

tomlock2• 12 years ago

I think we might be discussing slightly different aspects of the same thing. While I think there are certainly actions that the government takes which promote gentrification, I feel like the resistance to it can create communities which actually make the area more appealing to the next wave of gentrification!

For example, a squat populated by artists might actually provide more affordable housing for artists while simultaneously making the area more "bohemian" and appealing to the young professionals that like that kind of thing.

CyberPants• 12 years ago

New York culture and especially their art scene come off as what'd I'd expect to find if I were to open a magazine off the shelf and look through the ads. IMO stagnate and incestuous [1] [2] [3] ? Maybe I am not aware of the full breadth of NY's art scene?

It seems like Berlin [4], Los Angeles [5], Hong Kong/China & Japan all have much livelier melting pots of subcultures that may have been washed away in NYC due to cookie cutter art schooling or aspects of the local (sub)cultures?

[1] http://whitney.org/Exhibitions

[2] http://www.moma.org/

[3] http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/sentimentality-critique-hum...

[4] http://www.transmediale.de/

[5] http://machineproject.com/

Ollinson3• 12 years ago

This will come off as glib but screw it: New York City is art.

20 minutes riding the subway from point A to point B will give you a better glimpse of what it means to be alive than any curated show or painting. Everybody but the ultra-rich ride together in the same cars everyday. In most other cities people are insulated in their car/work bubble and only the disabled and poor take public transportation. This mingling is what makes living in NYC significant to me.

Why I Believe New York's Art Scene Is Doomed

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