Why I Believe New York's Art Scene Is Doomed
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
"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.
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.)
- 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.
Do artists improve the quality of life of a community of bankers? Who knows, and who cares?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
[3] http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/sentimentality-critique-hum...
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!
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.
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.
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.
In the UK such housing just doesn't really exist as far as I know. (If it does, I probably want to move there). Our planning system and the cost of land basically means that your home will necessarily meet some basic standard or you'll be harassed and end up having to tear it down.
I'd love to, for example, get a large static caravan, buy a few acres of land, site it and see how that goes for a few years. Maybe I'd hate it. But it just isn't really possible here.
Perhaps there are European countries where such a thing would be viable that I could emigrate to.
Agricultural / 'amenity' land can cost a few thousand pounds for an acre.
The historical reasons for such sit on my reading list...
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.
In the UK rural property is generally more expensive in addition to being remote. But then, our urban/semi-urban housing doesn't really resemble suburbia in the same way. Streets with detached homes, large drive, etcetera are relatively rare - more common would be semi-detached.
(This post has me wanting to visit the US now... all of my knowledge is gleaned from photos and hanging around American folk online, heh)
I mean; it sounds to me that a few years salary could enable you to live out in the sticks and 'retire' for a long time, if not indefinitely. That sort of thing would be impossible in the UK; ex-social housing in a run down town is probably your best bet.
It might be that I'm framing things wrongly simply because housing (and property tax) is so expensive here. All other expenses are practically negligible in comparison. $3-4000 a year could buy you basic food, utilities, and a computer to hack away on.
I could definitely be wrong, and I agree there is a point where you are just too far, but I live more than an hour from the city and meet people from towns even further away; life still happens as normal out here and it doesn't cost so damn much. So maybe don't live in a corn field, but don't insist on New York, New York either.
Trailer parks have a bad reputation for a reason.
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.
Living in the mountains..like say Montana, is even more expensive.
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.
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.
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
Is it really more expensive, or is it just difficult to afford to live there because of the lack of employment opportunities?
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.
Rezoning paved the way for true residential housing and with that came the high prices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg,_Brooklyn#Gentrifi...
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.
Anyway its all part of bigger forces, economic, social, demographic, etc.
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.
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.