who held on when everyone else was letting go.
Artists need cities because artists need audiences. Even if they don't live in cities artists depend on urban networks to spread and popularize their ideas. In the 1970s American cites were in decline, even New York, the cultural capitial of the nation, was hemorrhaging people, landlords burned their buildings, and the city seemed to be going to hell.
Urban planners speculated about a future without cities: a suburban future. In the heart of the once dense Bronx some blocks were raised to build single family suburban style housing. This was touted as the city's future. But, most of the time, all over the city, nothing was built at all. On the Lower East Side vacant brownstones with leaking roofs and missing walls became shooting galleries for heroin addicts. The city and state invested in highways, moving cars and building suburbs and they redlined the city. Fire service was reduced and LES, Harlem, East New York and the South Bronx burned. City leaders quietly waited for the population to fall, for the city to stabilize in to something smaller, less dense and less complex. But, something as massive and as ancient as New York cannot simply vaporize. It cannot dissipate, but rather it must implode, like a black hole, sucking everything and everyone in it down with it. Or so it seemed, at the time. We can watch a movie like Escape from New York today and laugh at the irony of the first few lines: "Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison." But, this view of not just of New York, but all dense American cities was very real in the 70s and 80s.
Nearly, everyone with the financial means to leave, did. Except for the artists. Artists need cities. Cities are cultural amplifying devices. They are hot-beds and incubators of creative energy. The very quality that city leaders sought to diminish: density is an essential element of the usefulness of cities to artists. Not only did the artists stay, but they kept coming, from all over the world, drawn to the cultural capital, looking for a big break or inspiration. They willingly entered a crumbling and disorderly New York. In their artwork and in their lives one may see a reflection of those strange days when we almost gave up on the project of being a civilization.
This is why the work of musicians, artists in theatre, fashion, and film in New York city in the late 70s and early 80s is so fascinating. Their work took place in a time of heightened urban despair and dark currents run though the music, paintings, trends, fashion, and theatre of the times. Andy Warhol's most famous and creative period was in the 60s but he remained in the city through the 70s and in to the 80s when he died. This was the period of the "corporate Warhol" in his own word "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." Warhol had always fashioned himself as an ironic "sell-out" but never was it more true. In the 80s the art scene became a "market" launching some into fame, like Jean-Michel Basquiat while leaving the majority on the dangerous margins of a tattered city.
Jean-Michel Basquiat brought a tiny hint of the energy of graffiti in to the world of "high art" --his work can be seen as a reflection of a decaying city that had at last stopped to examine the grim and often desperate writing on the walls. Real graffiti had no time for wallowing in misery. The scripts that covered trains and walls were infused with joy that acted like a tonic to brighten beak urban settings. Early Hip-Hop music served a similar purpose, it was fun and funny-- in defiant contrast to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that produced it.
Likewise, the disco, and later the punk scenes focused on fun. Too often this was intertwined with drug abuse. The story of Gia Carangi, a teenaged girl who came to New York in 1978, became a supermodel, partied at the mudd club and CGBGs and, just as quickly fell in to heroin addition, to die of AIDS in 1986 embodied both the decadent and destructive currents of these times.
But the city did not implode. Our New York is more alive and less dangerous. There is something glamourous about that past, but I think this beauty can only be seen in retrospect, it was not real. What was real was the decaying housing stock, surging numbers of TB cases, A mysterious plague, AIDS, and a dysfunctional and dark city. The so-called glamour and mystique of the age comes from the fact that people continued to enter the city, even during this time to seek fame and fortune, and in doing so risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for art. This is what makes graffiti, as an example, so fascinating. Who in their right mind would risk being arrested just to create art?
In the dark days of the city the few remaining had to band together-- this created a kind of unified scene or cultural moment, today the activities of artists are diversified-- there are a thousand scenes and more artwork is produced without the surrounding pressure of a dying civilization. We like to credit the resurgence of the city to better police work, to a better economy, to immigration and our growing ethnic neighborhoods but a large share of credit is due to the artists who held on when everyone else was letting go.
Urban planners speculated about a future without cities: a suburban future. In the heart of the once dense Bronx some blocks were raised to build single family suburban style housing. This was touted as the city's future. But, most of the time, all over the city, nothing was built at all. On the Lower East Side vacant brownstones with leaking roofs and missing walls became shooting galleries for heroin addicts. The city and state invested in highways, moving cars and building suburbs and they redlined the city. Fire service was reduced and LES, Harlem, East New York and the South Bronx burned. City leaders quietly waited for the population to fall, for the city to stabilize in to something smaller, less dense and less complex. But, something as massive and as ancient as New York cannot simply vaporize. It cannot dissipate, but rather it must implode, like a black hole, sucking everything and everyone in it down with it. Or so it seemed, at the time. We can watch a movie like Escape from New York today and laugh at the irony of the first few lines: "Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison." But, this view of not just of New York, but all dense American cities was very real in the 70s and 80s.
Nearly, everyone with the financial means to leave, did. Except for the artists. Artists need cities. Cities are cultural amplifying devices. They are hot-beds and incubators of creative energy. The very quality that city leaders sought to diminish: density is an essential element of the usefulness of cities to artists. Not only did the artists stay, but they kept coming, from all over the world, drawn to the cultural capital, looking for a big break or inspiration. They willingly entered a crumbling and disorderly New York. In their artwork and in their lives one may see a reflection of those strange days when we almost gave up on the project of being a civilization.
This is why the work of musicians, artists in theatre, fashion, and film in New York city in the late 70s and early 80s is so fascinating. Their work took place in a time of heightened urban despair and dark currents run though the music, paintings, trends, fashion, and theatre of the times. Andy Warhol's most famous and creative period was in the 60s but he remained in the city through the 70s and in to the 80s when he died. This was the period of the "corporate Warhol" in his own word "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." Warhol had always fashioned himself as an ironic "sell-out" but never was it more true. In the 80s the art scene became a "market" launching some into fame, like Jean-Michel Basquiat while leaving the majority on the dangerous margins of a tattered city.
Jean-Michel Basquiat brought a tiny hint of the energy of graffiti in to the world of "high art" --his work can be seen as a reflection of a decaying city that had at last stopped to examine the grim and often desperate writing on the walls. Real graffiti had no time for wallowing in misery. The scripts that covered trains and walls were infused with joy that acted like a tonic to brighten beak urban settings. Early Hip-Hop music served a similar purpose, it was fun and funny-- in defiant contrast to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that produced it.
Likewise, the disco, and later the punk scenes focused on fun. Too often this was intertwined with drug abuse. The story of Gia Carangi, a teenaged girl who came to New York in 1978, became a supermodel, partied at the mudd club and CGBGs and, just as quickly fell in to heroin addition, to die of AIDS in 1986 embodied both the decadent and destructive currents of these times.
But the city did not implode. Our New York is more alive and less dangerous. There is something glamourous about that past, but I think this beauty can only be seen in retrospect, it was not real. What was real was the decaying housing stock, surging numbers of TB cases, A mysterious plague, AIDS, and a dysfunctional and dark city. The so-called glamour and mystique of the age comes from the fact that people continued to enter the city, even during this time to seek fame and fortune, and in doing so risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for art. This is what makes graffiti, as an example, so fascinating. Who in their right mind would risk being arrested just to create art?
In the dark days of the city the few remaining had to band together-- this created a kind of unified scene or cultural moment, today the activities of artists are diversified-- there are a thousand scenes and more artwork is produced without the surrounding pressure of a dying civilization. We like to credit the resurgence of the city to better police work, to a better economy, to immigration and our growing ethnic neighborhoods but a large share of credit is due to the artists who held on when everyone else was letting go.