Believing is Art

So weeks ago, John and I were en route to the Ear Inn, that wonderful little spot in Tribeca where the right-most quarter of the neon "B" on the sign above the door has been blacked out to give the place its name. We were on our way there to discuss our plan to start writing and performing radio dramas again, and it was a wonderfully rainy night where the only idiots out were us and people like us. John is new to this city and a Bostonian by trade, so, as oft happens, our talk turned to neighborhoods, and the character and the rise and fall thereof.

And we're walking on the rain soaked cobblestones of northern Tribeca, walking on narrow streets between large hulking warehouses, colored by sodium lights. What is now known as Tribeca (wikipedia it. its complicated.) has been warehouses for more than a century. Used to store sugar, then art, then rich people. Its a usual progression, and John and I commented on that unexceptionally. But then, recalling a conversation we'd had about the death of industry, John asked, "where is art going to go?" (or something similar)

And it hit me. It's a really valid question. Art, John said, has followed industry. Old factories and warehouses are undesirable, and thus cheap, and so schmoes with a creative bent can afford them in order to do whatever it is that passes as that time period's creativity. That then raises the social cache of the area and the hip college students who want a piece of the action move in. These cats have more prospects and more spending cash, and so the "value" of the area goes up and up and up in an upward-spiraling feedback loop until it looks like TriBeCa or SoHo does today, the old undesirable real estate selling for (literally) $4mil per apartment. This is nothing new. But we're running out of dead industry in the US. It all left us in the Northeast about 40 years ago, and what little industry there ever was (comparatively) in the Southeast and Midwest has left over the past 15.

IN my mind there are two things that can happen, and perhaps both will. Perhaps John is right that art will become more rural. Places like Chapel Hill and Austin, virtually all of the mountainous regions in the Carolinas are testament to the fact that this can be. I disagree with John that this will lead to any more self-reflexivity. Nothing is more self-reflexive than, say, Williamsburg. Self-love is a problem in art everywhere all the time, and if anything I think small-town artist communities, where your neighbors see you as weird rather than chic is good insofar as it has the potential to keep art honest. Don't ask me what that means right now. But I think the other potential is that art within the urban areas will become increasingly residential and insular. Access to studio space will cost more and be more of a function of who you know. No one will be able to buy a storefront to create an edgy gallery. Think of it as patronage-lite. And so communities of art will become smaller and harder to find as the infrastructure that, in the past, allowed a degree of thriving is choked off by prohibitive expense.

Perhaps there is a third option. Art liberated from the need for such an infrastructure. The internet is, in this way, just a virtual version of the street art that proliferated in the early nineties, an art that does not need a shangri-la, but instead literally takes back its streets.

And perhaps this is among the healthier responses to the situation.
But it worries me, because its very nature precludes a certain kind of open artistic community.