What can our City government do?

The City should be running around like their hair is on fire trying to anchor the emerging arts here in our city, and not let them slip needlessly away to other, less expensive cities.

We have some very smart people in our City government, and only a lack of imagination will lead to the greatest loss of identity New York City will have experienced since the Brooklyn Dodgers left for wherever it is they went after they left here.

Luckily we have the best Mayor the cultural community has ever known.

Even so we recognize that it will be a very difficult task. Trying to get our heads around thinking about learning how to keep what has historically been ours is difficult. But with a creative economy worth 13 billion dollars a year and 300,000 local jobs it should be a task backed with some very significant resources.

Besides the cost of real estate, why do we need to think about this?

New York faces competition for every industry it relies on, from almost every city of comparable size, from almost every country you can think of.

The future of creative economy employment is not that employees will follow business, but that business that will follow vital pools of knowledge workers to wherever they choose to congregate. A significant factor in tipping decisions made by the best minds to come to New York City has been its place in the word as a cultural capital *.

But at the same time we get too expensive to afford small, emergent cultural spaces, other cities are about to target our artists to come join their creative economies.  They promise cheap and affordable space, a welcome mat, tax incentives, and a sense that there will be help and attention on the other side.

Just create a Google alert for “Creative economy” and you’ll hear the country busily talking about recruiting our artists by bidding against our weaknesses.

What can the City do?

Through tax incentives, zoning changes and bond issuances ** City Hall must find ways to incentivize rebuilding the emerging arts infrastructure that’s evaporating in our white-hot real estate market. To remain an effective cultural capital New York’s development and cultural policies must be linked ***. We can’t let New York become a Paris or a Rome; wonderful museum cities, but cities who for the most part don’t produce much in the way of relevant contemporary artistic culture.

It will be the City’s job to quarterback this ballet, and to motivate and challenge all the industries and cultural participants that benefit from New York City being a vibrant cultural city to action. The relevant agencies need significant new resources to do this, and they need them right now.

Robert Elmes
Director Galapagos Art Space

Appendix

* For the last fifty years the emerging arts in New York City have attracted the one smartest kid from everywhere. They scratched out a two or three-day-a-week freelance career, lived cheaply and brazenly and learned the street smarts that would one day inform 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.

• If through a lack of imagination we let that one smartest kid from everywhere begin to drift away we loose one of the most vital natural resources New York has, it’s ability to attract the significant over-achievers and savants that traditionally become our city’s financial, civic and cultural leadership.

** We’ve built baseball stadiums with City bonds, we can build emerging arts infrastructure too. If we can’t find ways to continue incubating young artists in our city then our entire cultural ecosystem begins to calcify.

*** The recent rezoning of the creatively clustered Williamsburg and Greenpoint sections of Brooklyn and of Long Island City in Queens has effectively ended those neighborhood’s existences as creatively clustered centers of importance. Bushwick is almost affordable for only about the next ten minutes and the point is that if artists can’t find each other in a city of 8.2 million people the creative economy has trouble functioning. The creative economy is fundamentally a social economy, one that can’t simply reestablish itself in another area at the drop of a planning map. If you can’t press the flesh you won’t get the job or the commission. And the pressing of flesh is very important for the artistic community in many ways, that’s why people want to live near it and why artists need to live within it. Or they’ll go elsewhere to find it.