THE ANNOUNCEMENT TEASED HERE YESTERDAY: I didn’t get the final random phone call from that TV quiz show on Tuesday, after having made it thru the prior qualifying rounds. Therefore, I won’t be out of town any week soon, and will be right by the ol’ computer dutifully uploading your daily doses of popcult ennui.
YESTERDAY, we started to talk about how so many of the folks moving into gentrified artist spaces are info-biz professionals who want to live amid an “artistic” community without the insecurities of personally trying to depend upon an artistic career.
There are some things these movers-in could do to help the painters, performers, writers, et al. they’re displacing.
The first thing they could do to help save the local arts community: Buy some art.
Specifically, buy some works by local street-level artists, not just from out-of-town big-name gallery stars.
The superficial response to this superficial suggestion is that too many alternative-contemporary artist types don’t want to make the kinds of slick, pleasant room decor rich folks like to have in their homes.
But that response neglects that a lot of the ladies ‘n’ gents moving into former artist spaces aren’t the bankers and lawyers who used to have all the money in this town, and who never cared much for non-glass Seattle artists.
A lot of the loft and condo folks are info-biz and software-biz studs. Folk with the inclination, or at least the potential inclination, to see themselves as outre “rebels” and connisseurs of the odd and wonderful.
To a large extent, the Seattle galleries aren’t tapping into this. They probably have wanted to, but haven’t yet figured out how.
Seattle’s Old Money never cared all that much for the contemporary arts. Seattle’s New Money could probably be trained to care; but a lot of it’s in the hands of former middle-class kids who didn’t grow up learning about the wonderful world of patronage.
I recently talked about this with my ol’ pal Matt Richter, who now co-runs the Consolidated Works performance/exhibition space, for a piece I wrote in Washington Law and Politics.
Richter said arts administrators he knew had been having some success getting new-money folks to chip in for one-shot or emergency donations; but that the nouveaus don’t yet “understand the meaning of an annual gift. They’ll be the hero once; but people in the arts have to train these people in the basics of giving. I don’t think that’s as big a problem as some make it out to be.”
I’m thinking an education campaign (what the heck, let’s go ahead and call it advertising) is in order.
Instead of nice, safe ads cajoling nice, safe people to “Support the Arts,” this campaign would run loud, brash ads inviting loud, brash people to, say, “Join the Party.”
The ads would emphasize the beauty, the vicarious emotions, the stories, the alternate lives, the points-O-view, and the experiences you can get from the visual, aural, literary, and performance milieus. The ads would beckon and/or seduce New Money folks into first becoming arts consumers, then into getting more deeply immersed and involved.
You may have already guessed the potential slogan for these ads:
“Art. The Original Virtual Reality.”
TOMORROW: A drink to free trade.
ELSEWHERE:
