Cultural Erosion: A Snapshot of Fine Art In Brooklyn

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Mo Kong, a 24-year-old Chinese MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I are sitting inside OUTLET Fine Art looking out the windows at passersby. Located on a remote stretch of Wilson Avenue, the gallery is one of the best in Bushwick. 

A kid comes out of the Dominican barbershop next door (which is doing brisk business); a homeless man pushes a grocery cart lined with a hefty bag; the French-speaking proprietor of the coffee shop next door jumps quickly on his moped to make a delivery and scoots away, ignoring two lanes of traffic. 

No one today has stopped to visit our exhibition, a mix of abstract painting and sculpture by four emerging and mid-career artists I curated, and hung five days before (its opening night replete with the usual sidewalk spillage and fanfare). Yet the passersby all take a moment to give a long, incredulous look at us sitting here, inside this fluorescent-lit, white-washed, glass-fronted space, like we’re a couple of tropical fish in a bowl. And I imagine they are all forming the same question on their lips: What sort of exotic life do you lead?’ 

Well, here are our stats: Mo pays $1,000 a month to share an apartment in Bed-Stuy with three other guys; he is here on an F1 Visa, so he interns at OUTLET for free. I am 50, and after I leave OUTLET I will stop by another gallery in a ‘better,’ more gentrified section of Brooklyn to write a review of its show for a major art publication; later, I will return home to the one-bedroom apartment I share with my husband and 12-year-old son. The magazine will pay me $125 for my review—three months from now, if I bug them enough. And, if any of the works in our exhibition sell, I will receive 10 percent. But I don’t expect that to happen. Our lives may seem exotic, but they are very, very real. 

I have been a Brooklyn-based art critic, curator, and artist for 20 years, championing this borough long before Mo ever heard of it. I have done what I wanted to do, and I’ve paid the price in personal comfort—the old “bohemian” formula. Yet over the last decade, something intrinsic to what makes life bearable—and more importantly, meaningful—for creative people like myself has disappeared. Mayor de Blasio had it spot-on in his “Tale of Two Cities” campaign message. There is a terrible divide between the elite and the day-to-day real people of this city, between the people who have hope and the people who don’t. But, to be honest, I am a part of the elite, and I don’t belong here, either. 

My problem is harder to parse out, its subtleties more refined. My tale is of Two Cultural Cities: one for the people who are comfortable trafficking in irony, and one full of people who are not. How would Albany even begin to understand this dilemma? It should. Brooklyn is the cultural capitol of New York—if not the world—and its infrastructure of artistic meaning and relevance to itself (something that is too hard for legislators to infiltrate and too complicated for grant-driven, non-profit organizations to fund) is eroding. 

WHEN DID THE IRONIES BEGIN? 

Probably in the winter of 2000. 

Things were easier in the mid-1990s when I started covering what was then the burgeoning Brooklyn DIY art gallery scene for Time Out New York. Back then, editors were skeptical, and I’d have to verbally arm wrestle them for any chance to give the borough ink. I’d walk back and forth under the elevated BQE to the South and North Sides of Williamsburg; I’d dodge dumpsters, climb flights of dimly lit stairs. My search was for professional, artist-run galleries with regular hours, and solid, well-thought-out shows. And I was well rewarded. 

Flipside, on Withers Street, a scant 80 feet from the highway, run by the husband-and-wife team of Tim Spelios and Caroline Cox, who gave over their personal living space to championing local talent, was one favorite. There, I discovered motorized sculptures by longtime local Ward Shelley that did absurd, yet impressive tasks, like a toaster with a soup-ladle arm” that tried to haul itself up to a shelf—and never quite made it; and the delicate spidery creations of Lynn Mullins made of fishing line filament and clear-plastic rain bonnet wrappers that dangled from the ceiling. 

Pierogi on North 9th Street (still considered W’burg’s emeritus gallery), run by Joe Amrhein, was another. Amrhein found a way to give more than 500 artists the chance to show in a limited space: flat files, full of works on paper, searchable alphabetically as well as by medium. It was an innovation that allowed fledgling collectors to acquire good art at reasonable prices, and many a gallery in Brooklyn has since started its own stable from those files. At that time, it was as much a risk to write about Brooklyn—if not more—than to show there, and I felt like I was shoulder-to-shoulder with the artists. Then, in February of 2000 Time Out decided to feature Williamsburg on its cover, and I wrote the lead article on my much-beloved galleries. The piece came out on a Thursday, and when Pierogi opened at noon the Saturday after there was a line of people waiting outside the door. New York Magazine and The New York Times ran similar stories soon after. 

As one longtime local curator Larry Walczak told me, “That was the beginning of the end.” 

I killed it. I invested in Brooklyn, and I helped to kill it at the same time. Only one of the galleries I mentioned remains—they either became successful and upgraded to Chelsea, or folded, priced out by skyrocketing rents. Brooklyn has had hundreds of galleries come and go over the ensuing 14 years, and we all know the story that’s unfolded in their wake: artists colonize “up-and-coming” areas with their lofts and galleries, then decamp when local developers price them out. And to what end? $40 dinners sold on Wythe Avenue (where previously the “original gangsters” artists in the 1980s had to walk each other home in groups to stay safe). $14 cocktails on Flushing Avenue, the closest stop on the B57 bus to Regina Rex, today’s coolest gallery in the vast, warren-like building of 1717 Troutman Street where the consortium Yale-ies who run it put on shows of conceptual photography (Is it a photo or a painting?) that regularly get reviewed in the Times. 

Gentrification is such a given at this point, that frankly, the debates I have with fellow artists and curators aren’t so much about being priced out, as they are about purpose. We all know that we can’t afford to live here, but on a deeper level: What meaning does showing in Brooklyn still hold? 

THE INTERNET: COMMUNITY KILLER OR HELPER? 

Recently, I was on the phone with a well-respected dealer of 20th-century and contemporary photography, who opened up Arizona’s only full-time art gallery 34 years ago and has managed to hang on quite successfully. He said that he had just gotten off the phone with a collector in Minneapolis. “It’s 101 degrees outside on the sidewalk, but what does he care?” The Internet, he said, changed a great deal of how he did business, and allowed him to stay were he was. “Place is becoming irrelevant,” he told me. 

Things in Brooklyn are more complicated, and I’d wager that today making a go of it in Tucson is easier than my trying to sell a work on Wilson Avenue. Before the Internet, Brooklyn wasn’t so accessible, and that, frankly, was good. Now over-privileged white kids roam the same streets I pounded as a girl reporter, looking for “out of the way” places they know they will find with confidence to locations heretofore deemed inaccessible, mapped by subway stop, finding shows that have been pre-reviewed for their consumption with just that right amount of “edge.” The uncertainty has been taken out of art going, and in the contemporary arts, a certain amount of uncertainty is good. Google has taken it a step further. Researchers tell us that our keyword searches are memorized by Google and “optimized” so that we are assured, in future searches, of finding the sorts of results we’d most like to get. Ultimately, this sort of cultural profiling results in a Balkanization, a creation of sub-communities of cultural preferences that is devastating to a geographic community at large. Ten years down the road, we may look up from our iPads to find we are living in a borough populated by more consumers than creators. We have become unwitting purveyors of the “Brooklyn Brand.” 

My suggestion to the Mayor: Reward curatorial integrity more than artistic product 

People talk a lot about Brooklyn artists, but they ought to be giving more credit to the people organizing the local art. In our postmodern era, display, as much as material, is considered a creative act. What’s more, it’s a vote of confidence. It’s kind of like buying a car from a reputable dealer, or looking for the ILGWU label—only in Kings County it would be a bit more, shall we say, idiosyncratic. Oftentimes these worthy people are, themselves, artists (like Amrhein); sometimes they are art historians (like my favorite former Brooklyn Museum curator, Charlotta Kotik, who has racked up more studio visits in the borough than anyone I know). Sometimes they are simply “independent curators,” like Jason Andrew, who also runs a not-for-profit gallery called Norte Maar out of his home, and “buys in” one artwork from every show he displays—a policy of investment I wish the Brooklyn Museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, would implement. (Imagine the vote of confidence that would send to the borough! But, alas, he only cedes small areas of his three-block-long museum to living artists who pay taxes in Kings County.) They can be old or young, experienced or straight out of school. But they have to be invested in Brooklyn artists and have a vision, and be willing to be held accountable for what they hang and show. Well, kind of like us. 

Quitting time. No one’s come. But Mo and I aren’t surprised. We’ve spent our time tweeting and Facebooking the show, hopefully creating FOMO—fear of missing out—among the culturati, who we know will be so jealous of our zip code they will feel like they have to show up. 

Once outside, I will also make a point to talk to my neighbors, one by one, at the coffee shops, the local businesses, and introduce myself. “I’m a curator and I’m showing some art across the street that’s about ‘taste’ and ‘texture’ and ‘synesthesia’ and, frankly, it’s a little hard to take.” They will look at me incredulously at first and then I know they will smile. I’m a real community operator. “I’ll be there next week. Want to come in and see?” 

That’s the irony of my Two Cities. Try branding that. 

Sarah Schmerler is an art critic, curator, and artist based in Brooklyn. She can be found at TheSchmerler.tumblr.com.