Book Review

Book review by Eric Miller

At the time he turned forty the painter Martin Johnson Heade had yet to produce a distinguished painting. In 1859 he rented a studio in New York 's Tenth Street Studio building and changed his fate. His contact with other members of the Hudson River School radically improved his work. Unfortunately Heade later moved to Florida and was all but forgotten.

New York wasn't the center of the art world in the 1850s it is today, but Heade's story shows that New York was well on its way to being a place where people make things happen. In turn, the city makes people happen.

Leaving Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol also went to New York. Unlike Heade, Warhol never left New York and is never to be forgotten. Like Warhol's Factory, the Tenth Street Studio of the Hudson River painters allowed Heade to meet other painters, as New York allowed artists to meet people of other professions, with divergent expertise, at random, that helped their career. Except if going to New York is a purposeful act, it might not be as random as we might assume.

The Warhol Economy , a new book by Elizabeth Currid, seeks to uncover the importance of the arts to New York's economy, and further reveal the importance of the arts to urban economies and economic development.

Currid has something in common with Andy Warhol?they both left Pittsburgh for New York. Currid wrote in a 2006 article about a spurt of creative energy in Pittsburgh that took less time to fizzle than it did to emerge. Why is New York different? "It is a city that is willing to take risks and invest in the intangible, like the arts, creativity, and human capital," Currid wrote.

While we assume finance is behind the success of New York, in actuality fashion is the industry most concentrated there. Not only has fashion concentrated in New York, but other arts from theater to galleries have concentrated in New York's neighborhood. Even though the internet has allowed us to live anywhere, there's no substitute for being where everything is.

Currid discusses the hangouts of artists, from clubs to restaurants, as well as the way that people meet and are discovered. She discusses the "gatekeepers" who launch careers. Magazine editors and record producers, being in New York, have a much better chance of getting a glimpse of an aspiring artist. The art in Kansas City may be as good, but the gatekeepers aren't there to open the doors.

"It's not just the clustering of culture," Currid says, "but what that clustering means to the rest of the world--the mark that New York has made on the products that emerge from its cultural geography allows the city to maintain its monopoly in the global marketplace of creative goods and services."

If New York has that market locked up, what can other cities do? First, New York has not always been the center of the art world; at the time of Martin Heade, it was undoubtedly Paris. Also, just because New York is the center doesn't mean things can't get started elsewhere. Los Angeles has an edge in the motion picture industry, Grunge came from Seattle, Motown from Detroit, and who can forget the ongoing impact of Nashville?

"Art and culture work best when they are most dense," Currid says. "It is the concentrated environment of live-work-play that makes art and culture work in New York City." Currid says the most creative neighborhoods are those with a variety of galleries, nightlife, and coffee shops--third places that allow for interaction, or as Jane Jacobs would say, "an intricate sidewalk ballet." Currid says cities should look for ways to facilitate this, both with zoning to allow for mixed-use spaces, and by finding ways that artists can live in the same neighborhoods.

Let's not lose sight of the reasons why we want art in a city. First and foremost, it's an economic generator, perhaps New York's most important industry. Secondarily, creative people also create a lively environment that attracts others to want to live nearby. This is increasingly important in a world where jobs follow talented workers, rather than the reverse.

The lesson for cities out there might be that art, coffee shops, theater, lively 24-hour neighborhoods, galleries, and the like go together. These are the seeds not only for creating an economy based on art, but for creating better places to live. When talented, creative people want to live there, the jobs will follow. Art might just be the seed that makes the rest happen.

Reviewed by Eric Miller

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