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The other day I took the L subway to Brooklyn, disembarking at Metropolitan Station, and following directions I'd written on the back of an envelope that had contained an invitation to donate money to George Bush's Presidential Library. Of course I went the wrong way. This being Williamsburg, streets were paved with slender young things in skinny legged jeans and preposterous hair, all of them worrying about their feelings, and how they might be perceived, or as they like to put it "judged".
I was meeting someone who doesn't really care how he's judged. John Holt operates what must be one of the smallest art galleries I've walked through, but also the most unusual - the CCCP gallery.
Full disclosure: John's my neighbour, so you can treat what follows either as an expression of proximity, or curiosity. In fact it's a little of both. By day John works on sets for a television network, but in the weekend, you'll find, him - as I did - sitting outside CCCP, waving people in, and offering them a variety of art. He does it because he's an artist himself, but mostly I think he does it for fun.
I wanted to talk to John about the Brooklyn/Williamsburg art scene. Why? Recessions can be helpful, if not to artists themselves, to creative endeavour. Think of the James Agree in the Depression, or Busby Berkley, or Otto Dix during Weimar. As people grow more desperate, they come in to sharper relief. Art can be there to pick up the pieces.
The story John told me was one that is recognisable for banking, real estate and retail in the US. The soft market has evaporated, crushing risk and experimentation. Major brands predominate; conservatism reigns. The sole consolation, John Holt told me, is that poseurs depart.
Perhaps people really need to lose all hope before there is the ferment described at the beginning of Gregor Muir's Lucky Kunst about the YBAs, when young artists moved into the Shoreditch section of London. At the moment, the spiral is downward. Even a local Williamsburg mainstay gallery, Jack The Pelican, present for a decade, is closing, forced out it's said by rent increases.
The real estate market is down, but it's not as collapsible as the art market.
A thread runs through the development of art in New York's history that is attached to real estate; or as John Holt put it, "The only ghetto you want to be in is a gallery ghetto." Here's how it goes. Artists inhabit Chelsea in Manhattan, get priced out, go to Tribeca; get priced out, go to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, get priced out, go to Bushwick.
Bushwick is further into Brooklyn. Its claim to pop culture fame is providing the first appellation for Bushwick Bill, a one-eyed (a girlfriend: a gun: a struggle) rapper with the Geto Boys. But even Bushwick, where I used to live with all the self-righteousness of a white man slumming it on the wrong side of 36, is getting tapped out.
As John and I sat and chatted, some people came in. John made no attempt to solicit them. They looked about, and left. Generally, when art goes up against real estate, the latter wins. And the future? The CCCP gallery, I'm sure, will still be squeaking by, albeit in a different part of town.
"You come back in 10 years," John told me, "and there'll be a high rise here, after they've skinned this pig, and taken everything but the oink out of it."
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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