What can the largest cultural institutions do?

There are three things to protect in the real estate wildfire burning through the emerging arts.

1. Emerging audiences:

Subscriber bases aren’t grown in a vacuum. The largest institutions can import all the artists they want they can’t create emerging audiences; the emerging arts do that work.

Emerging audiences start out just like young artists, they find a niche and develop a relationship with the arts at the emerging level and later translate that into the experienced and literate interactions that support the larger cultural institutions. As audiences that can afford the fifty or the seventy-five dollar ticket ‘gray out’ they wont be replaced unless we have an emerging artist environment that engages audiences up to that level.

2. Emerging Artists:

Within the next few months, ten off-Broadway theaters will permanently close. In the cultural life of New York City that is a shocking development.
 
To compete against our white-hot real estate market and the discouragement it proves for young artists an important job of the largest cultural institutions is to rapidly create completely unexpected areas of opportunity that make emerging artists heads spin.

Imagine if a young dancer could ‘emerge’ at Lincoln Center, or if MoMA had an incubator residency that resulted in some kind of programming? Or what if the Public Theater taught some of what they know about audience development and financial management to the little venue down the street, and what if that mentoring resulted in joint programs that added real credit to real resumes? What amount of opportunity would that telegraph across the United States?

3. Emerging Staffs:

The great cultural institutions of this city are currently staffed and guided by persons almost all of whom found their way into their present life through a little door in the side entrance of a little space somewhere off the beaten track in New York City. Can you imagine a development director flown in to New York because we couldn’t keep growing them here? Well without the little venue down the street, you’ll have to.

Going forward:

The effectiveness of New York City’s cultural leadership and our city’s ability to remain an effective cultural capital, not only a touristic one, are what will be defined as the measure of this age. In the coming years the cultural community of New York City will face a number of issues it never really had to think about. How we face these challenges will define New York in the coming decades.

Responsibility is the burden of leadership. If you want to be a cultural leader in New York City, now is the time to lead.

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.