Arts Around the Country

I realize that I have been dormant for so long and part of that is a lot of work coming up over the last few months as far as museum installation gigs go, but this lag in activity is also due to a roadtrip I took. In many of the art magazines lately I have been seeing adevertisements for a place called Paducah,KY. Since I had some down time coming up and was going to Chicago I thought that I would road trip it with my girlfriend and see what Paducah is all about. Many small towns and some large cities, like Detroit, have been turning their broken down neighborhoods over to artists in order to revitalize these areas and give the local economy a shot in the arm. Well, after a little tour around Paducah and talking to people who came down under such an idea as cheap homes & land, I have basically found this out. The game plan works much like this: the towns offer the land and buisness spaces to artists for cheap (yeah, its about time), in turn the artists have to come armed with checks and bank standings close to $500,000.00 in liquid assets, along with a buisness plan for the local community that is traditional and not necessarily arts related. After talking to one shop owner, I came to find out that many of the first people to undertake this to set up galleries had to shut up shop. As to why these people shut up shop and left, that was not really clarrified but one can only imagine that a serious lack of support from the community probably was a big help to that.

In my own walking around the area, I could not see much support for the arts other than the performing arts. The visual arts in the area seemed to be second if not third fiddell to commerce. The most upsetting thing is that when we walked around the town to check out the "gallery" spaces it turns out that the display spaces for the art was over tables in resturaunts, behind the counter at a chocolate shoppe, and in back rooms of a convenience store.

This is a point that many of us in the art world are completely aware of, that in the view of the public we are just picture makers, that what we do is just decorate the living room, but as artists we make the investment in excavating the soul for meaning for years, moving to urban centers which are far from families and friends. When we attend higher education for years, sometimes as many as a decade learning the history of visual culture, learning how to read and interpret images and learning how to push our own visual culture forward, we are left still to the mis-conception that we are decore makers. This is not the case. Ever. So, cities and towns like Paducah and Detroit, before you decide to make an offer to basically give land to artists in exchange for us to revitalize your shattered images, ask yourself what you are giving us to help you out. A little advertising in a couple of magazines is not enough and if you can't figure it out, then hire someone who knows what is happening in the arts and can get the ideas right.