Where Do Bohemians Come From? - NYTimes.com
Where Do Bohemians Come From?
By ELIZABETH CURRID-HALKETT
Published: October 15, 2011
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City.”
Los Angeles
THESE days, even the National Endowment for the Arts is getting into the job-creation business. Last month it started a $23.5 million effort to revitalize blighted urban neighborhoods, including money for public arts projects in St. Paul, museum renovations in Detroit and artists’ housing in Harlem.
The idea that art can be an economic engine is hardly new, and a walk through SoHo, Venice Beach or Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood shows it can work. The N.E.A.’s promotional material makes clear that its goal is to create new SoHo’s in hard-hit cities across the country. But contrary to the N.E.A.’s good intentions, it takes more than grants and tax breaks to make the arts thrive. Too often, art-driven revitalization efforts overlook the mercurial nature of art itself.
Take the now-canonical revitalizations of New York’s SoHo and Chelsea districts. By the 1960s, both areas had an abundance of abandoned light-manufacturing buildings — perfect breeding grounds, in retrospect, for artists.
But it took something else, too. Paula Cooper, who opened her first SoHo gallery in 1968, could have opened anywhere; deindustrialization had emptied large parts of the city. And when the dealers Larry Gagosian and Barbara Gladstone, as well as Ms. Cooper, opened in Chelsea in the mid-’80s and ’90s, it was not because SoHo’s rents were too high, as the conventional wisdom said.
What drove them was the need for even bigger spaces to fit the even bigger aesthetics of artists of the moment like Richard Serra and Jasper Johns. Mr. Serra is known for his freestanding steel sculptures, some 14 feet tall; Mr. Johns’s enormous canvases require high walls. “If you want to show big work, you need big open doors ... and concrete floors,” Ms. Gladstone told me.
SoHo and Chelsea were full of such large, lofty spaces; the East Village, among other, similarly cheap neighborhoods, was not. SoHo and Chelsea offered another advantage. Studying historical zoning codes, my colleague Richard Green and I found that unlike heavy manufacturing, which was mostly pushed to the city’s fringes, the light-manufacturing buildings that dominated these neighborhoods were adjacent to conventional residential neighborhoods, with coffee shops, restaurants and other amenities.
By 1971, when the city rezoned SoHo buildings for artists’ work-live spaces, it was merely catching up to a phenomenon well under way. The rezoning also allowed commercial activity on the buildings’ first floors, opening the way for more galleries and restaurants, adding momentum to the neighborhood’s already robust revitalization.
But art’s physical characteristics are just one factor in shaping where it takes root; the social, political and economic context matters, too.
Take the emergence of the arts district in London’s East End in the late 1980s. In many ways, the area fit the SoHo model: cheap, flexible spaces that were close to urban amenities. But it didn’t really take off until 1988, at the height of anti-Thatcherism, when the artist Damien Hirst opened an exhibition featuring a slate of politically charged artists. Soon labeled the Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.’s, they yanked British art into the center of the contemporary art world.
The radical anti-establishment character of Y.B.A.’s art seemed to grow with the rise of Tony Blair and his New Labor in the 1990s, culminating in the 1997 exhibition “Sensation.” Such works as Mr. Hirst’s infamous stuffed shark floating in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s tent “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With” replaced stodgy historical pastoral landscapes as representative of British art.
An explosion of interest in their work had a transformative effect on the East End, with galleries and performance spaces paving the way for trendy apartments, restaurants and shops. None of this was planned, nor could it have been.
The evolution of these districts shows that using art as a development tool is like working with quicksilver: it’s hard to know which path it might take, and a tough proposition when dealing with taxpayers’ money and foundation grants.
Which is not to say that there’s no place for programs like the N.E.A.’s. But it does counsel circumspection. These examples demonstrate that specific cultural circumstances dictate art’s role as a change agent. Instead of a shotgun approach that assumes every post-industrial zone or blighted district can, with a few million dollars in subsidies, become the next SoHo, we should follow the lead of the metaphorical college that puts down sidewalks only after the students have hewn their own paths.
Groups like the N.E.A. should first identify where artists are doing promising work, and determine whether public resources might help catalyze an artistic community. There’s nothing wrong with looking to art as a way to raise a city’s economic development. But before we go tossing money at anyone with a paintbrush or an art space, we have to understand the complex ways artistic communities shape our cities’ fortunes.
