Canaries in the goldmine:
The emerging arts in New York City.

Canaries in the goldmine: The emerging arts in New York City.

Recently two developers walked into the Brooklyn apartment of my friend and told him he had nothing to worry about - they weren’t going to tear down the building he was living in for at least another year. My friend, a filmmaker, thinks he can’t possibly afford to stay in New York, and he’s not alone.

The canaries in New York City’s real estate gold mine – the emerging arts – are no longer talking about the next show they hope to land, they’re talking about the next city they think they can land in once their current lease runs out.

But for many that lease on life has already run out. Affordable habitat in the cultural ecosystem is becoming hard to find. For everyone.

Within the next few months, ten off-Broadway theaters will permanently close *.
To read Miriam Souccar’s prescient article ”Off Broadway theaters take their last bow” in the 6.05.06 Crain’s New York, click here;
http://www.newyorkbusiness.com/page.cms?pageId=1375

The price of real estate has risen so far that, from a cultural point of view, in three to five years we’ll be experiencing a fundamentally different idea of what it means to live in New York City and be a New Yorker. City Hall must find ways to incentivize rebuilding the emerging arts infrastructure that’s evaporating in our white-hot real estate market, or it won’t be built.

The past:

For the last fifty years the emerging arts in New York City have attracted the one smartest kid from everywhere. These young cultural migrants scratched out a two or three-day-a-week freelance career, lived cheaply and brazenly and learned the street smarts that would one day transform their art or adopted industry. Not everyone who begins as an artist ends up with a career as an artist, and the result for New York City has been a significant contribution from the arts to the culture of aggressive and intelligent management that helped make New York the leader in the arts, finance and media industries.

The present:

In a New York too expensive to incubate young artists many of these best young minds will fly right past our exploding real-estate market and rezoned artistic neighborhoods to cultivate and grow cultural and economic opportunities in other, less expensive cities. It’s important to remember that these young artists have no loyalty to New York; they’re from places like Des Moines after all.

Many in New York City believe that the vital underground of emerging artists’ environments is here to stay ‘just because’. This is wrong. New York doesn’t have to be the cultural capital of the emerging arts, or of the financial or the media industries for that matter, New York needs to continue to earn its place and it can easily price itself out of that role **. London is only one of many capable cities who are very busy trying to beat us at our best industries.

The Future:

As more and more cities begin to understand the advantage they can place in their populations by proactively attracting the emerging arts and either establishing or buttressing their own creative economies, the bidding for our young cultural participants will begin.

Smart cities will soon make New York based artists offers they’d be foolish to refuse, and cities like (gasp!) Philadelphia, Berlin, Pittsburg or London will get the most adventurous of them – the ones our meritocracy would obviously miss the most – if we can’t find effective ways to continue pooling them here, in our city.

Maybe one can’t live and work speaking only English in a city like Berlin this year, but in 5 to 7 years it will be possible. English is fast becoming the lingua franca of cultural Europe and the danger for New York is that if cities like Berlin or Amsterdam can by policy one day show that they want our young artists more than we, they’ll get them if we can’t be either relevant in opportunity or affordable enough to pool them here. And we must pool them here. If we can’t find ways to continue incubating young artists in our city then our entire cultural ecosystem begins to calcify.

What we need to do:

The cost of real estate is crushing the emerging arts. We’re about to see a huge exodus of emerging artists leaving new York for other, less expensive cities. To even think about retaining them we have to incentivize the creation of opportunity at the emergent level. And we have to create lots of it.
Why?

If emerging artists and the best young cultural thinkers can’t see themselves possibly affording to live here then we’d better find ways to make them think they can’t possibly afford to live anywhere else.

In the end only one-thing matters: good artists and the best young cultural thinkers follow ideas, and ideas flourish when and where there is opportunity to realize them. .

No one can roll back the cost of real estate or prevent small performance spaces from becoming chic little clothing stores, but to create so much opportunity in this real estate climate that we remain an effective cultural capital and not simply a wonderful museum city where art isn’t made, there are a number of questions that must be asked.

What can our City government do?
What can the largest cultural institutions do?
What can the foundation and funding community do?
What can the business community do?
What can our next Governor do?
What can you, the audience, do?

Robert Elmes
Director, Galapagos Art Space

(To read about our need to expand Galapagos Art Space click here)

Appendix:

*  (Souccar; Crain’s New York 6.5.06) The ten off-Broadway theaters that have closed already or are about to close are; The Douglas Fairbanks Theater, The John Houseman Theater, Lamb’s Theater, Manhattan Ensemble Theater, The Promenade, Perry Street Theater, Playhouse 91, Sullivan Street Playhouse, Century Center and Variety Arts.

**When a parcel of land sells for one hundred and forty million dollars in Greenpoint, and a pier, not even the one with the best view, sells for forty million dollars in Red Hook then there aren’t that many places left to site the emerging arts or allow artist communities to cluster. Yet the foundation of our thirteen billion dollar a year creative economy and our magnetism as the best place to make a career in every industry from finance to medicine rests squarely on our identity as a vigorous and vital cultural city.

“A New York that is seen by the emerging arts here and in other parts of the country as too expensive to either dream about or continue producing work in begins a tipping of the very understanding of New York City as a cultural capital.”

Canaries in the Goldmine: The Emerging Arts In New York City
2006 Galapagos Art Space

Forward freely.