An awful lot of artists in the Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl were producing an awful lot of art.

Beyond the obvious “culture high” one gets from wandering around and among so much creativity, I’m starting to wonder about a few things:

1.  Do most North American cities of 2.5million people have this size of art community? Or is this an example of Vancouver’s prodigious wealth in the “creative class”.  We tend to like to think we’re special, but maybe we’re kidding ourselves. I don’t know.  
    
2.  What’s the attraction of that artistic, studio-scene? Both K & I remarked about how attractive the artistic life seemed from this superficial level. That said, after a while, I started to wonder how many of these artists were really making a living from their art, how many have to have second jobs or alternate incomes to support themselves, and how many are essentially dilletantes who are using some other source of income to support their artistic lifestyles but don’t really have a chance of ever supporting themselves with this stuff. Furhter, there’s two kinds of people in this latter category: those who’s art isn’t commercial and who don’t feel inclined to change it to make it so (and there’s nothing wrong with that); and those who’s art is, let’s face it, not very good!
    
3. A studio (which seems necessarily to have to be in a fixed location) doesn’t seem very nomadic. Perhaps it’s not,  but there do seem to be people there who can and do create their art in various settings and use their studio for only particular parts of their process. 
    
4. There’s a whole ‘nuther thing about the artistic community being urban pioneers and making a place for a next wave of urban dwellers (who then make a place attractive to a third wave, and so on). The huge trap with this cycle (and one Vancouver is caught tight in) is that the second (and third) waves of urbanists cause real estate prices to go up and price the artists complete out of the district. In Vancouver this is hugely exacerbated by our crazy-high land prices which are just now beginning to subside (but not nearly enough for the average (starving) artist). 

1 Comment

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  By Olechka-persik, December 9, 2008 @ 9:29 pm

  Thanks for post. Nice to see such good ideas.

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