Thursday, March 03, 2016
Where have Boston’s artists gone?
The Boston Globe: WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE IN PITTSBURGH, my apartment senior year was alleged to have once been rented by Andy Warhol, when he was studying commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology. The staircase was narrow and unlit, ready to give out at any moment, and the unit’s floors were about as sturdy and level as the Joker’s lair. The freezer was so impacted with frost that the peas we eventually discovered during a thaw may well have been left behind by Warhol himself. Sadly, there was no canned soup.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This article is, as one might guess, very focused on Boston. Though it has a lot of good points in talking about artists and especially artists who need to have certain requirements or resources for their art. While I don’t disagree with anything that the article says, I think that its focus is very much on visual artists – artists who need a specific space for their work. Someone, like the poet mentioned in the article, who doesn’t need a specific space might decide to live in an artist community for the sole purpose of being around other artists. They may not have the same restrictions as other artists – they have few needs for their arts and can maintain a full time job while working on their art. For those of us who work in theater, I think that this is sort of a grey area in the realm of artists. When people think of artists, they often don’t think of those who work in theater. Being a designer has certain connotations for people and that may play into their ideas of income and artistry. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in a community like this (assuming I could afford to live elsewhere) because sometimes, after a day or week of working on/being an artist, I just want to get away from it all.
We’ve read a lot of articles on this blog about how Boston’s theater district is shrinking due to the BU- Huntington situation and the Emerson- Colonial situation, but we haven’t heard much yet about the fate of freelance artists trying to make a living in Boston. While I can’t personally relate to the struggle these artists are facing in terms of finances and making it in the art world on their own, growing up just north of Boston (I actually live in Andover, which they mention as an outside- of- Boston living option for artists who can’t afford the city’s rent), I definitely empathize with their situations. People make a big deal about how expensive it is to live in NYC, but Boston’s prices are just as bad. Even though I’m not in the heart of Boston often, just in the past few years I’ve definitely noticed the shift from an artsier community to a city more focused on business and history. Even as I’ve been applying to theater internships for this summer, I’ve only been looking at places in and around Boston since I’m trying to stay close to home, but it’s been very difficult to find any Boston theaters who have a summer season. While I’m not familiar with the politics of what free-lance artists need to do in order to survive, I can’t imagine surviving (and possibly supporting spouses/ children) while paying for rent in the city on an artist’s salary. I think it’s great that there are places in Lowell and Somerville that are trying to make spaces so these artists have a chance to succeed, but at the same time it’s very saddening to see such a historically and culturally rich city fail to support its rich artist community, and to know that I will probably have a hard time working in the city I’ve grown up with.
The idea of living in a community of other artists didn’t really sink in for me until halfway through this article. The opportunity to live among other people producing work, looking for and creating inspiration, not only seems exciting and intriguing but invaluable. I have heard the argument in favor of keeping housing available for artists (in addition to other people who can’t afford high rents and are being gentrified out of their neighborhoods), but had not fully connected the potential of having communities of artists in a city and the community of artists itself. It is pretty easy to understand from the surface that having artists as members of a larger community (living in the city) is a beneficial thing, but it is also beneficial for that community of artists to be just that: a community in its own right. Without the arts, humans are nothing but a weird species whose only goal is self-preservation. Many argue that the arts are what make humans “human.” In an age where everything is becoming so tech-focused, we cannot forget about the artists. Something that CMU brags as a unique quality is its combination of arts conservatories seated within a research university: artists and engineers working on the same campus. While the respective workloads of students at CMU inhibit what I think could be much more extensive collaboration, the university has a point, and it’s something that we should be trying to replicate in our much larger city-communities. The influx of tech workers into Boston is great, but who’s going to inspire them? Who’s going to collaborate with them in cross-platform work? Without maintaining the artist communities in our cities, our technical innovation will not flourish to its full potential.
This story sounds sadly familiar. As someone who got to witness the beginnings of San Francisco's decidedly ungraceful transition from a more gritty, diverse, and arts focused city into the sleek, more polished tech driven one, my heart goes out to the artists of Boston. I don't know when the city will realize how much it misses its communities of artists, its warehouses full of installation artists and their sprawling crafts, or the gnarled potters, backs slightly bent over potter's wheels they stood up from hours ago. I don't know when the next art gallery will realize that it can't ring up a friend of a friend anymore, to get a little show together for Sunday, an excuse to drink wine at 3PM and order catering. I don't know when the last portrait photographer will move back to his mother's in Southie, or when an avant-garde macrame artist will decide to go back to school, both realizing this going after your dreams thing people can't seem to shut up about is way less attainable than it seems. I don't know when it will happen, but I know it's coming, and I know it's going to hurt.
Artists and arts communities are like public parks. If you neglect them, all the little pretty oases you took for granted will wither up and die, and you won't notice until you wake up one day, and you get hit by how grey and colorless your city has become.
Beware, Boston, beware.
I think it's so ironic that in our world which is becoming increasingly more accepting and hungry for artists, they still get pushed out. Artists are expected to live on the fringe and suffer in order to create their art, which the city of Boston seems to be taking advantage of. You cannot expect a city, community, or culture to survive without artists. And by allowing them to be pushed out, you are willingly participating in squashing culture. You are encouraging artists to flee to different areas, and then wonder "where is all the nightlife going? Where is all the culture going?" When a city focuses on tech and history, that's fine, those things have their place, of course. But just because tech in hot right now doesn't mean you can squander the rest of the community to make room for it. Just because it's trendy to live in lofts right now so rich people want to do it doesn't mean you should make the living prices sky high! On the individual scale, it makes perfect sense to do this, for landlords and developers alike. But the city of Boston should be worried about the shrinking arts presence.
Post a Comment