Artists a couple of you guys wrote me back yesterday, asking me to clarify some of the stuff i wrote about the relationship between being an artist, the places or neighborhoods where artists choose to live, and the racist, exclusionary attitudes i encountered during my apartment search. i didn't flesh that argument out very much yesterday, and i think i got misinterpreted -- one person even felt singled out by me; he felt i was tacitly criticizing his decision to move from one area of the city to another. i don't mean to take a holier-than-thou position here at all; we're in this real estate market, uncomfortable though it may be. but this is an important subject, so i feel the need to break it down further, and even get up on my big red soapbox for some old-fashioned preaching. for obvious reasons, artists (hell, i do this too) want to pretend that they are part of a counterculture, and that simply by dint of being artists, and leading unconventional lives, they are undermining a corrupt and hegemonic civic/cultural system. this ignores the important role that artists, and, more specifically, the "art scene" and its scenesters have played in this, and other, boom towns throughout the nation. those of us who are artists are an extension of the development arm of the real estate industry. that's our relationship to the mode of production. i know that none of you want to hear this, but the only reason why we are valued at all by this city (and probably by this society) is because we serve a very important role in the transformation of worthless brownfield property into valuable parcels of land. because of our willingenss to operate as a vanguard for developers, and the cattiness and territorialirty we exhibit about the neighborhoods in which we live, we can turn a slum into a land-speculative goldmine in less than ten years. did you ever wonder why the city doesn't crack down on commercially and industrially-zoned space that's being flagrantly used for residential and artistic purposes? it isn't because of the kindness of the heart of howard safiir, and it certainly isn't because the municipal government doesn't know what's actually going on in those lofts. don't kid yourselves: if the local government (and the real estate industry which supports it) wasn't profiting in the long-run from the presence of artists in those buildings, we'd all be out on our asses as surely as were the squatters on avenue d. but artists, who, historically have been the first and most willing to settle previously marginalized neighborhoods, increase property values by giving the area a hip, exclusive cache. don't get me wrong -- it isn't the presence of the artists, or god forbid, the art itself, that increases rents and prices -- it's the hipness and exclusivity that accompanies and new "art scenes" that eventually gets packaged and sold to prospective new renters. this is what happened in hoboken and soho in the eighties: and now in the nineties, upscale restaurants with french names and chain stores move in. what gets moved out? local commerce, and the working-class residents of the neighborhood suddenly need to pack up and move, because they can't afford the rent hikes. and so another section of the city gets squeezed. the irony, of course, is that eventually, the artists themselves, who began the process, get squeezed out too -- unless they become part of the commercial apparatus of the city by turning their names and identities into popularly consumed brands. but that's extremely difficult to do. still, the competitive scramble to become the next jeff koons motors the process of gentrification, and artists who either cannot or will not play the game of commercial capital are forced to look for a new place to live. what can we do? we need residential quarters, and we need space to rehearse, perform, and cultivate our craft. for most of us, relocating to a barn in iowa on principle is out of the question, and it wouldn't be responsible of us to move out of the city anyway -- we're new yorkers and new jerseyans, and that is, in a crucial way, what our projects are imp-about. but too often, the cultural imperatives of the ruling class and the big industries hide behind the mask of hipness, and too often, i see us falling for that disguise. not asking the right questions, not attempting to examine *why* it is that certain actions and groups are fashionable. there is tremendous cultural pressure right now on artists in this city to move to certain neighborhoods -- i don't need to name them, you all know what they are. there's nothing intrinsically *wrong* with following the exodus to those neighborhoods -- but what *is* wrong is refusing to acknowledge or understand that that cultural pressure is there for a reason; that the real estate, restaurant, and marketing executives who consider you, as an artist, part of their long-range plans for hotel and expensive condominium development; those executives picked out those neighborhoods long before you did. they spotted the location on the map, the availability of loft space, and they determined the future of those blocks. so when you reinforce the exclusivity of those neighborhoods, either by reifying what goes on there, or by making other people who live elsewhere feel un-hip (even accidentally, and we *all* do things like that accidentally), understand that you are doing the work of the developers. you're starting the process which will eventually force lower income and working class residents to move out. so the next time you're looking for a place to live, and somebody hip, impressive, and de-historicizing tells you about how you have to move to such-and-such neighborhood because that's where everything is "happening", look into their eyes and notice that it's the dursts, the rudins, cushman & wakefield, the del forno brothers in jersey city, and hudson harbor realty speaking through them. you owe it to yourself, and to your art, to find out something about the history of the neighborhood, how it's changing, who's currently getting screwed, etc. look, i realize that development happens; i'm not a neo-luddite, you all know that. especially in good times, neighborhoods change -- rents go up, competition for space gets ridiculous, and everybody loses a little something. that's not what i'm getting at, here, though: we, as artists, can help confound the process of gentrification, and throw a wrench into the plans of developers, by being a little less competitive, a little less exclusive and exclusionary, and a little more genuinely cooperative and historically conscious. and that'll make the art better, too. |