TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday’s online edition, which may or may not affect how the site’s updated later this month.
MADONNA SONGS are rarely part of the “soundtrack of my life” (actually, my life doesn’t have a soundtrack so much as it has a DVD “commentary track,” but that’s a topic for another day).
Yet I couldn’t help but running a Madonna song through my head last Sunday–“This Used to Be My Playground.”
I was at the former art-studio building at 66 Bell, where I wrote my first Misc. column in June 1986 for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper. This was my first time there since the building owner had kicked all the artists out and arranged to have the whole place redeveloped into luxury condos.
It wasn’t ugly (the new interior was still heavily under construction, so it still had that “unfinished” look and didn’t have any pretentious decor-elements yet). But it was still creepy.
What used to be a cheap, funky space for young Caucasian adults who sought creative careers and urban lives, is now going to be an expensive, slick space for young Caucasian adults seeking creative careers and urban lifestyles.
What people like me have been calling the strangulation of the local contemporary-arts subculture has been interpreted by others (including some condo sellers) as the ultimate triumph of the scene’s aesthetic.
These condos are being marketed as artsy experiences for gals ‘n’ guys who always wanted to live the artsy life but who haven’t had the chance (or the fiscally-ruinous compulsion) to try to make a career out of painting/sculpting/designing/writing/acting/music-making.
Instead, a lot of these buyers are in what euphemists sometimes call “the information industry.”
They may design and sell software, engineer computer-networking schematics, set up corporate databases, schlep books for Amazon, or think up PR campaigns for business-to-business e-commerce solution enablers or whatnot. But what they really want, in the condo marketers’ ad fantasies, is to live in the middle of all the artistic stuff.
This pattern has already occurred in several other “artistic neighborhoods” in several other North American cities. By the time enough condos are installed in one of these “artistic neighborhoods,” much of the “artistic stuff” devolves into commercial activities designed to service the condo dwellers–cheese shops, sushi bars, thumpa-thumpa electronica bars.
It’s not that the gentrifiers hate the milieu of struggling artists. They love it. To death.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If some of the material resources of some of these “artistically minded” info-biz professionals could get ploughed back into the artistic communities that used to reside in some of those buildings, everyone involved might become a little better off.
TOMORROW: A little more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
