Dark Matter

The art world is not what it was back in 2000. The author of this book blames it on the internet ruining everyone’s desire to get out and see things. Real estate values don’t help either when it comes to art. In the chapter Glut, Overproduction, and Redundancy he portrays Soho as a former artist colony with dirt cheap rents, forced to change thanks to a rise in the value of Manhattan’s buildings. In the 1990’s the art galleries moved to Chelsea, and by 1997 it was already getting expensive. No artist can live there now!

Studio space has migrated away to Brooklyn, so the actual artist studios are no longer anywhere near the physical art world. It’s the same thing with Europe; a lot of the work in the Venice Biennial is made in Berlin. London had artists working in run-down neighborhoods too, and there it was even more extreme. Here in the USA we had Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Morgan, Chase, Cooper, Hewitt, Pratt, Whitney, Ford, and Dupont sponsoring all the museums. But in Britain you didn’t have all the millionaires with their museums, so the artists had to hustle even more. The average British artist took the cheapest rent he could, so you had artists and musicians working in London’s East India docks long before it became “The Docklands.” Nowadays there’s no way an artist could afford to work on the waterfront. Same thing with Notting Hill.

But there is hope. Groups like “Not an Alternative” are using abandoned buildings, and there’s the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in the East Village. In the last decade, art seems to have moved from a display-for-profit approach to an activist approach, and perhaps that’s just as good. You can’t use art to mock big business if your sponsor is a big business. That’s like biting the hand that feeds you. Back in the Great Depression, there were still wealthy industrialists who sponsored artists despite the lack of revenue. But today, it’s over. The biggest spenders have lost everything. Even the well-endowed museums have lost their savings. Perhaps in this decade, the art will truly come from within, not motivated by money?