The Aspiring Artist's Dream.
Now that I am once again safe in the bosom of Pittsburgh, I can find the mental space to consider my trip and impressions of New York City, circa 2007. One of the most unsuspected reactions I experienced has to do with the speculative idea of living in such an environment fulltime. All throughout my twenties I entertained the idea that I'd love to move to the "Big City". It had to do with the beehive of activity that such an environment represents. I honestly believed that I could have found everything I wanted from a life within the Five Boroughs. In retrospect, it's a bit shocking to think about how naive an idea this was. During that period of my life I fancied the simpleminded vision of what an artist's life was "supposed" to be like. What that really amounted to was hanging out with the pose of a disaffected hipster, and producing very little of anything with true merit. The thing is that one would have to be independently wealthy to pull off that lifestyle in NYC.
Meanwhile that choice was very easy to make in a place like the 'Burgh, where even the middle-class wastrel youth can emulate his/her vision of the lives of the artistic saints. One can truly meet their goal of being a fullblown slacker in a place like this. You don't have to make a lot of unseemly compromises and/or bust your ass just to survive day-to-day life. In NYC you'd have to work so many hours that you would defeat your purpose. In the meantime you'd be living in a shitty little apartment with roommates crawling over you like cockroaches. Forget trying to advance yourself. If you can sponge off your family, then you might be able to approximate the freedoms a typical Pittsburgh service industry wage slave currently enjoys.
If you need to live in the perfect embodiment of the Social Darwinist petri dish in order to kick your own ass- then so be it. You can return to your hometown years later and talk about all the cool stuff you couldn't afford to do or see when you spent your formative years in NYC. Your friends will get a huge kick out of those stories, as they lounge back in the houses they bought at prices (psychic and monetary) that constitute a mere fraction of what you would have had to pay in whatever upcoming NYC neighborhood where you tried to make a go of it. Anyway, the days when you might have been able to scrape by and buy property on even an upper-middle class salary in Brooklyn are long gone. And if you were all-the-time trying to get noticed as an artist, forget about it. There are a million aspiring art star wannabes competing to be one of the hundred or so emerging artists to be included in a Chelsea gallery summer-time group show.
New York City is the prototypical American dog-eat-dog metropolis. Unless you are born into the Alpha Male class, you can forget about it. You have as much chance of winning the lottery as being "discovered". Everybody is screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to get noticed. If you have a loud voice and prior connections you might eventually save up enough to get the fuck out of that rat race. And with all that noise you are trying to generate, when do you think you'll find an opportunity to do any quality work? Go to Williamsburg and try to figure out why there are so many ironic twentysomethings snaring at you. They've realized that they've sacrificed their chance to build any real equity, they have no health insurance or retirement plan, and they are still mere plankton in an ocean of sharks. Is it any surprise that they resent all the entitled-from-birth yuppies who are moving into the brand new condominiums in the once-cool neighborhoods that starving artists struggled to build?
Perhaps there is a viable formula that includes a stint in NYC as a realistic component. Maybe if you work and save money in your hometown, and produce a quality body of work first, you can rent a room in one of the transitional NY neighborhoods. You'd have to have a large chunk of change, so you can devote yourself to networking within the arts scene. If you can then convince an aspiring art dealer to make a studio visit (just tell your three roommates to get lost for the day and scatter your paints and canvas around), then you could possibly worm your way in. Who knows? But you should be prepared to recognize when to cut your losses. Good Luck.
Meanwhile that choice was very easy to make in a place like the 'Burgh, where even the middle-class wastrel youth can emulate his/her vision of the lives of the artistic saints. One can truly meet their goal of being a fullblown slacker in a place like this. You don't have to make a lot of unseemly compromises and/or bust your ass just to survive day-to-day life. In NYC you'd have to work so many hours that you would defeat your purpose. In the meantime you'd be living in a shitty little apartment with roommates crawling over you like cockroaches. Forget trying to advance yourself. If you can sponge off your family, then you might be able to approximate the freedoms a typical Pittsburgh service industry wage slave currently enjoys.
If you need to live in the perfect embodiment of the Social Darwinist petri dish in order to kick your own ass- then so be it. You can return to your hometown years later and talk about all the cool stuff you couldn't afford to do or see when you spent your formative years in NYC. Your friends will get a huge kick out of those stories, as they lounge back in the houses they bought at prices (psychic and monetary) that constitute a mere fraction of what you would have had to pay in whatever upcoming NYC neighborhood where you tried to make a go of it. Anyway, the days when you might have been able to scrape by and buy property on even an upper-middle class salary in Brooklyn are long gone. And if you were all-the-time trying to get noticed as an artist, forget about it. There are a million aspiring art star wannabes competing to be one of the hundred or so emerging artists to be included in a Chelsea gallery summer-time group show.
New York City is the prototypical American dog-eat-dog metropolis. Unless you are born into the Alpha Male class, you can forget about it. You have as much chance of winning the lottery as being "discovered". Everybody is screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to get noticed. If you have a loud voice and prior connections you might eventually save up enough to get the fuck out of that rat race. And with all that noise you are trying to generate, when do you think you'll find an opportunity to do any quality work? Go to Williamsburg and try to figure out why there are so many ironic twentysomethings snaring at you. They've realized that they've sacrificed their chance to build any real equity, they have no health insurance or retirement plan, and they are still mere plankton in an ocean of sharks. Is it any surprise that they resent all the entitled-from-birth yuppies who are moving into the brand new condominiums in the once-cool neighborhoods that starving artists struggled to build?
Perhaps there is a viable formula that includes a stint in NYC as a realistic component. Maybe if you work and save money in your hometown, and produce a quality body of work first, you can rent a room in one of the transitional NY neighborhoods. You'd have to have a large chunk of change, so you can devote yourself to networking within the arts scene. If you can then convince an aspiring art dealer to make a studio visit (just tell your three roommates to get lost for the day and scatter your paints and canvas around), then you could possibly worm your way in. Who knows? But you should be prepared to recognize when to cut your losses. Good Luck.
Labels: Art, Art Marketplace, NYC, Pittsburgh
posted by Merge Divide at 3:14 PM
2 Comments:
Nice post. I too love New York, I had also lived for quite a few years in San Francisco where its also quite expensive. Pittsburgh has most of what you could ever want and you can get to New York and other cities from here without too much trouble. These cities are places to refresh, if we can't live here. I know quite a few artists who have chosen Pittsburgh for similar reasons. I even market houses to them sometimes (see 854 Suismon at http://www.dunnrealtor.com )
It's good to hear artists are starting to realize that you don't have to punish yourself to live a good life.
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