Edit: Added (Lower) Manhattan (which was the epicenter of most NYC culture 60s-80s).
I live in Flatiron. My neighbourhood has multiple experimental ballet, jazz, classical music and small-style theatre venues. And it isn’t even a hotbed for any of those things!
For the audience it comes with, New York is cheap. Add to that our strong subsidised housing programs, many of which have special vouchers for artists, and our comfort with roommates and lack of a need for a car and I think you’ll find a thriving creative scene, in Manhattan and across New York.
This is weird to me, because my social circle is full of Berklee and conservatory grads in these spaces, they all live here and are successful in their fields... and yet they have a better chance of their work being staged in Texas or Baltimore than they do here.
It does not follow that it is easy to get booked here. Of course it will be more competitive to be staged in New York than in Baltimore. But the pay-offs are higher. So you see quality concentrate with the ranks of the expelled replaced by ambitious newcomers.
I've seen a lot of mediocre performances.
To the author’s point, these are the default tastes of shallow wealth. You will find services of these genres/motifs anywhere you find wealth. Your point does not imply “creativity” but production and performance. It does not imply enlightenment but rather the very essence of decadence.
Are some of these participants creative? Naturally. These forms are plenty important/respected in culture and the arts, but that is not the perspective which underwrites their survival in NYC. This survival is based on their compatibility with wealthy patrons.
Realize that 1940s modern art, which is most associated with NYC becoming the center of the world’s art scene, was entirely a product of the working class.
A better measure of the neighborhood’s creative DNA is the number of cultural events in Madison Square Park, where just yesterday there was an LL Bean promotional event taking place next to a Brooks Brothers promotional event (you can’t make this stuff up).
In this New Yorker’s opinion the last time your neighborhood had a creative pulse was when artists and photographers lived there in order to be within walking distance of the (now long-dead) photo district, where all the labs and darkrooms were. How many musicians and ballet dancers live there now, when a take-out salad in a plastic bowl is easily $20?
The linked article is maddening to me b/c it’s so damn accurate.
Yes? And it isn’t a school, it’s a repertory. With performers—not kids—from a variety of backgrounds.
Next to the promotional events (which aren’t always horrible) you will find publicly-funded music performances in the park (I never go to these), lectures at NYU and the New School, and random local performers at several bars in the neighbourhood. (Though I personally prefer the West Village for jazz.)
I don't know if this is true. Hell, I'm pretty damn unhip and I even know a number of artists/musicians/writers living and working in Harlem.
In the 20th century, Greenwich Village was known as an artists' haven, the Bohemian capital, the cradle of the modern LGBT movement, and the East Coast birthplace of both the Beat and '60s counterculture movements.
Greenwich Village has undergone extensive gentrification and commercialization;[9] the four ZIP codes that constitute the Village – 10011, 10012, 10003, and 10014 – were all ranked among the ten most expensive in the United States by median housing price in 2014, according to Forbes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village
While there still may be a lot of arts and culture going on in Lower Manhattan, it is unquestionably a pale shadow of its former self. Don't take my word for it:
David Byrne (of Talking Heads): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/new-yo...
Moby: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/03/leave-...