By Dan Fox
Posters by André Saraiva for Creative Time at the corner of Lafayette St and Great Jones St, New York, 2013
Walking to work in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, I passed a grid of fly-posters that caught my eye. ‘NEW YORK’ read the top line, and underneath, in much smaller type, ‘I LOVE YOU’. Below was a list of names, listed in gradually diminishing size:
LOU REED
DASH SNOW
ANDY WARHOL
KEITH HARING
SAMO©
TAKI183
RICHARD PRINCE
DEBBIE HARRY
MICKEY MOUSE
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
And at the very bottom:
CREATIVE TIME.
The bills were pasted at the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Street, affixed to wooden hoardings surrounding the currently dormant building site for a boutique hotel that, if it ever gets finished, will be just the same as every other boutique hotel in the city. I continued north along Lafayette; past Robert Rauschenberg’s old home and studio (a former orphanage), past The Public Theater (formerly the Astor Library, one of the founding institutions that evolved into the New York Public Library), and across the junction where the charmless lump of black glass that is 51 Astor Place opened a few months ago. (Its malignant spirit is currently channelled on Twitter @51deathstar.)
Staring at 51 Astor Place, I wondered what bothered me more; yet another example of real estate, like a coked-up Patrick Bateman, violently stamping on the face of all that made New York an intoxicating and diverse place to live, or the ball-and-chain that’s been forged from the city’s cultural history – the roll-call of past generations, the names of artists, writers and musicians hopelessly incanted as if they might ward off the evil spirits of financial over-privilege, rapacious property development, and cultural homogenization. Designed by street artist André Saraiva, the Creative Time ‘dream posters’ were, I assume, well-intentioned fun; harmless local cheerleading, a sentimental salute to the city’s veterans and its dead. Still, any vision of the city’s heritage that only manages to list one woman and one black artist, and imply that Dash Snow had any creative influence beyond a parochial Manhattan media froth, is a depressingly narrow one.
The irony of the poster is that few of the names listed – with the probable exception of Snow, offspring of the wealthy De Menil family – could today have afforded to start out in New York City, doing what they did way-back-when. In an article published earlier this yearThe New York Times reported that, ‘the average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide.’ There are more than 50,000 people homeless in the city; according to New York’s Coalition for the Homeless, these are ‘the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.’ Whether conditions will change under mayor-elect Bill de Blasio remains to be seen. But one side effect of the urban sanitization through money that New York has undergone is that nostalgia reigns tyrannical in this burg. New York is shackled to a Just Kids ideal of a place now long-gone; jingoist histories of its artistic past that often feel as much like self-help pep-talks as anything else. (Surely there’s a good reason why we’re all breaking our backs to earn enough to stay here?) What happens when a city obsesses too much about its glory days, high on its own supply and convincing itself that it’s still got all the moves? It suffers collective dysmorphia of the urban body; a false image of itself caused by excessive consumption of Ab Ex monographs, No Wave t-shirts and Warhol iPhone cases. History becomes ‘heritage’, just another way to sell a neighbourhood, craft ales, or whichever dull, minimal-lite painter is this week playing ‘Let’s Pretend’ SoHo circa ‘73. As my West Coast-based friend Robert once put it, ‘NYC does love to touch itself.’
I’m not saying anything you’ve not heard before. Lamenting change in New York is a perennial pastime here. New high-rise and old tenement buildings represent decades of push and pull between transformation and preservation. And who am I to complain? I’m as guilty as anyone of scratching the sores of nostalgia, and as a relative newcomer to the city, easily seduced by soft-focus postcards of New York’s demi-monde ghosts. Downtown ’81, Wild Style, Painters Painting, Kafka Was the Rage? I’ll hoover up any and all of that old time grit. Just last week, I began to immerse myself in Up in The Old Hotel (1992), the collected writings of legendary New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell. My timing was bad: stories written in the 1940s portraying Greenwich Village eccentrics and the patrons of Bowery ale houses don’t sit well when in the same week tawdry photos drift north from art fairs in Miami depicting artists, curators and architects hanging with reality TV stars, or arm-in-arm with Playboy bunnies. If antediluvian gender politics and starchitects in conversation with pop stars is what we’re aspiring to, then we might as well turn off the lights and all go home.
At least, that’s what I find myself thinking when I grumpily try and parse these uneasy juxtapositions before I’ve had my morning coffee. With caffeine in the bloodstream, a more circumspect and hopelessly optimistic side of me knows that we shouldn’t be going to press with the obituaries for art quite yet. But we can talk about how the arts in New York have been haunted and taunted by change over the past few months. In April, Cooper Union art and design school – located right next door to 51 Astor Place – announced that it was to start charging tuition fees from 2014, ending 150 years of free, meritocratic education. Musician Lou Reed died in late October; the final sign, for some, that a scuzzy New York of the popular imagination had croaked its last. The same week, the New Museum announced it would be turning its next-door warehouse space into a 24/7 business ‘incubator’ for ‘more than 60 startup and creative entrepreneurs.’ On 12th November, it was in New York that Christie’s netted $691.6 million at its Contemporary Sale – an auction result that should have made anyone with half a conscience revolted by the excess of money. A week later, a mecca for the city’s graffiti artists – the 5 Pointz building in Long Island City – was whitewashed overnight by the building’s owners, who wish to demolish the 19,000-square-metre building in order to build a 1,000 unit apartment block. Twenty years’ worth of graffiti art and murals were wiped out to make way for steel, glass and money. The same week, Bloomberg, the New York-based financial news agency, announced that it would be closing ‘Muse’, its arts reporting division. Said Bloomberg editor-in-chief, Matt Winkler; ‘We decided to scale back arts coverage and no longer use the Muse brand, and we’ll align our leisure reporting with Pursuits and the luxury channel on the Web.’ New York I love you but you’re bringing me down.
Faint notes of threnody echoed through recent shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art. T.J Wilcox’ film-in-the-round, In the Air (2013) was an elegy to people and places in New York’s history; Andy Warhol, Gloria Vanderbilt, Antonio Lopez, airships docking with the Empire State Building, 9/11. ‘Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama – Manhattan, 1970–1980’, curated by Jay Sanders, shed light on previously overlooked underground performance and theatre work in downtown New York. Michael Smith, Jill Kroesen, Erica Beckman, Jack Smith, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, the Kipper Kids and Squat Theater: it’s unlikely that any of the work these artists made could have existed in New York under the city’s present conditions. I find it sadly apt that the last exhibition to be held at the Whitney Museum’s uptown Marcel Breuer building next year will be a retrospective of former Wall Street commodities trader Jeff Koons.
New York has a past to be immensely proud of, but c’mon: let’s stop playing with the CBGB commemorative Frisbee in the long shadow of history, or else lose sight of how the present can change.