Brooklyn, NY is getting closer to sprouting its vision for the 21st century with a design by the international architecture/art star Frank Gehry. Gehry’s complex of buildings will amass housing, shopping and a sports arena. For the obvious reasons in America there will be no cultural component for the arts. One might argue they already have the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a museum anchored into the park. Isn’t this enough for the city who is second to that of Manhattan? I think differently, Brooklyn is the city that houses the most artists per acre of any soil on this planet! It is like the corn industry in the middle of America, once it took root, it has become infectious and grows like a weed. In New York it started at the first subway stop out of ‘the city’ and now it is at the tenth or more. People are trying to hold onto a certain neighborhood status even though they are over nine stops out of the real center.

In recent months I have been reading, from California, the horror and tragedy of certain artist occupied buildings in Brooklyn. No, the news never seems to break from a building in Manhattan because the high economy has helped push an exodus of the cultural producers(artists, writers, dancers, actors and designers) from the island over to the mainland of Brooklyn. Cheap rents, space, pioneering neighborhoods and a sense of community have attracted the shift. Soon Manhattan will be secured and occupied by the international portfolios of the super wealthy and the tourist. Sad as it seems it has become closer to the truth in just the two years since I have relocated from Brooklyn. The issue is getting the attention of the city government and they have formed teams and entertained meetings that try to understand the consequence of this plight.

Why do I go into this stuff? Well, it is based in a theory that I have concerning the artist as tool and I use tool in the most degrading way. After the success of Soho and then Tribeca, each have become valuable neighborhoods that artists originally pioneered, the developers got smart. The developer uses the artist as a bookmark and allows them the fiction of a few productive years in a post industrial loft space. During this time the renter usually has no heat or very little (business hours), cold water (that is likely positioned in the communal hall) and no conveniences on the street. If they build it, as artist triumphantly do, the rest will come. Wow! Does this not describe the last decade? The devastating conclusion to this NYC story is that the developers do not renew leases and start fixing everything from the sidewalk to the stand pipes and put it all up for sale.

The district of D.U.M.B.O. (down under the manhattan bridge overpass), Brooklyn turned overnight and now you can get chocolate from Jacque Torres and Starbuck’s coffee for the other hand. In the past you would not be lucky to find a quart of milk in this district. Yes this is a neighborhood with a few barriers(the expressway, Farragut projects and the East river) that prevent a scene like Willaimsburg from spilling so far out but it created what all developers would like to happen, demand over supply. Taking this into account I firm up my belief that this is the real future of New York City. ‘No man is an island’, cries out from my childhood, and I wonder if it is the artists that find the island for the man to take control over, and every step of the way the man hides behind the ‘good’ work they do for the arts? It definitely appears to be going this way and I think this can be viewed as a critique of the frantic art collecting going on currently with the contemporary art world. Here is an idea maybe they should start having art and design fairs in the neighborhoods these artists live? I then wonder who would be empowered by this sustainable way of creating an economy around the arts?