An edited version of this report was recently printed in the 12/19/13 issue of H-Art Magazine (Belgium)

Absentee City: Who and What is Missing in Our Cities and Our Art?

Reflections on the 2013 Creative Time Summit

by Daniel Tucker

The garbage truck roars down the street at one in the morning, the taxis dodge one another near busy bars, peering into the late-night kitchens – new culinary fads are assembled for eager and hungry customers, signs of new construction are apparent on nearly every block. On my weekend-long visit from Chicago to New York City, strolling the derelict sidewalks of Brooklyn densely dotted with new businesses exuding immense style, there were no signs of recession and there were no signs of poor people. Obviously there are poor people in America’s cultural capital (last year’s census shows an increased poverty rate in the city rose to 21.2%), but that evidence of their culture and to a large degree their bodies, presents itself less and less every time I visit this city. To talk of “gentrification” is to invoke the ambiguous perpetrator of economic and cultural change – the ‘invisible hand’ of the last 30 years of urban life. But fundamentally, underlying the blame and guilt game of gentrification, is to grapple with the urgent question of who is allowed to live, and express themselves beyond mere survival, in the cities they have passionately toiled to create?

While economic recovery has its local expressions, the web of interests being served by urban “vitality” and “regeneration” (to deploy a few buzzwords) in cities like New York are decidedly global. When innocently asking friends, both small business owners, who was moving into the new and rehabilitated housing stock with an average monthly cost of $2,539 for a single bedroom in Brooklyn, they surprised me with the answer that it was mostly “rich Australian teenagers or Australians using Chinese investors money” to buy places. While this response is entirely anecdotal, the real estate industry has reported trends of this kind with Chinese investment in US real estate reaching an all-time high of 1.7 Billion this year. Without claiming full-on protectionism or conspiracy, the most tangible negative consequence of this trend are inflated costs of housing disconnected from local earning levels. The less-tangible impact is that frequently second homes or investment properties are occupied only by  part-time residents whose relationship to their surrounding communities is often distant as they carve out more space for themselves. Outgoing billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has advocated his own brand of cosmopolitan trickle-down Reaganomics, recently exclaiming, “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.”(3) This vision has progressed in reality, with a huge increase in millionaires calling the city home in recent years and the city’s richest 1% taking over 39% of the city’s income in 2012 according to the “The Gilded Age of New York” published by the Fiscal Policy Institute (4).

My purpose in this visit is to attend the fifth incarnation of the “summit” organized by the public art organization Creative Time, the sponsor of numerous large-scale projects throughout the U.S. and the arts-journalism website Creative Time Reports. This year’s theme, “Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st Century City,” is deeply preoccupied with gentrification, placemaking, and the socially-engaged art practices that might offer critical insights into those loaded concepts. In the text that follows, I will weave my general observations from throughout the weekend with attention to specific experiences that crystallize the most provocative images, forms, processes and themes introduced by a small number of the nearly 50 presenters. It is my hope to provoke a deeper consideration about the impact that those who are not present have on places and the people who remain present.

The impact this kind of development has on the arts is complex. On the one hand, major institutions, auction houses and blue-chip galleries have seen an increase in donations and sales by the super rich. The challenging question for urban dwellers concerned with living an arts-rich life is what kind of cultural production can thrive in a bastion of the super-rich residents and absentee landlords? In a recent pre-summit Creative Time Reports post by musician David Byrne, the dire problem and equally depressing solution were posed as “Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists…If young, emerging talent of all types can’t find a foothold in this city, then it will be a city closer to Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi than to the rich fertile place it has historically been. Those places might have museums, but they don’t have culture. Ugh. If New York goes there—more than it already has—I’m leaving.”(5)

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