What can the business community do?

Take off the black tie, put on blue jeans and head downtown or across the river.

The blue chip institutions are in the midst of an unprecedented building boom, frankly they don’t need you specifically, but they’ll happily shake your hand and keep accepting your money. But the emerging arts organizations do need you. They need the professional experience you have that they lack, and they need your input and what you have to offer them in the way of guidance.

You should be on the board of at least one of them.

The price of real estate has risen so far that, from a cultural point of view, unless we do something concerted and effective, 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.

What brought you here and concentrated opportunity in this city was its rich and unique mix of financial and cultural habitats. The future of human recourses is not that employees will follow business, but that businesses will follow pools of knowledge workers, wherever they choose to congregate. And they’ll increasingly choose based on the quality of the life they can lead. For New York that means we have to keep a robust and vibrant cultural environment alive at all levels of possible interaction.

Think about the NYSE going fully electronic and buying a European exchange; with a global electronic stock market operating twenty-four hours a day suddenly every city on the globe is a geographic portal on equal footing with New York City. If we want to continue to collect your very important resources, top-flight talent, here, in our city, then you need to become involved at the emergent level either by joining a board or putting your money where the future needs it invested now.

New York is a great city, one of the greatest cultural and financial cities to have ever risen; perhaps the greatest. We can’t let that change in our time. That would simply be a lack of imagination.

Robert Elmes
Director Galapagos Art Space

“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.