Art & Commerce & Cherokee
Sharon Zukin, a sociologist and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, is quoted in last week’s New Yorker as saying:
Everyone says it was the art galleries and edgy performance places that were drawing in the public. But I think it was the consumption spaces — the stores, bars, and cafes where you could look through plate-glass windows and see people living a kind of aspirational life, but in a low-key, affordable way. Brooklyn came to be understood as a place of creative consumption.
I can’t help but read that quote and think about it in terms of the Cherokee Street district in south city. Sure, there are a lot of great independent art galleries speckled along the way that add a lot of flavor to the neighborhood (as this recent article in the St. Louis Beacon illustrates), but it isn’t really clear to me how much these low-rent art galleries are actually contributing to the local economy. The New Yorker article talks a lot about how there was a boon of DIY artisans and crafters and shopkeepers who gave the borough the reputation it has today — niche markets being filled by people who made and sold their own furniture and soap, or dyed their own linens or baked their own bread. This is the direction I see the neighborhood going, with places like Firecracker Press and Black Bear Bakery and Cranky Yellow (apparently) thriving, and I hope it keeps on this path. It’s not that I don’t think the art galleries serve a vital purpose (they do!), it’s just that I think American culture tends to value consumerism over art. People would rather buy “artsy” things than art, and “buying stuff” is what drives growth (and, ugh, the other “G” word: gentrification). Who knows. Give it 5 years and we’ll all be talking about Cherokee hipsters and South Grand yuppies.
