About a half hour after I had closed my gallery in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) the other day, an aggressive knock at the door revealed a Hasidic gentleman looking somewhat anxious. I let him in and he looked around, rather confused, asking "Is this a spa?"
"No," I replied. "It's an art gallery."
"What do you do here?" he countered.
"We exhibit paintings and photographs," I answered, a bit surprised that anyone would not understand the concept of a gallery.
"Oh," he answered, clearly uninterested, and left somewhat brusquely.
Through the short interview, I had the strange feeling I was being inspected somehow, but couldn't understand why. Then I read this in the NYTimes:
A 'Plague of Artists' Is a Battle Cry for Brooklyn Hasidim
There are two interesting issues here for me: gentrification* and culture wars**; and one rather obnoxious hypocrisy.***
*I know the day is coming when there will be serious clashes between the hipsters moving in around my gallery and the families (mostly poor Puerto Rican) who live on our street. So far, our open-door policy and educational approach to the community has bought us good will from our neighbors, but they're clearly not so impressed with the new, extremely well-dressed and uptight yuppies snapping up each new vacant apartment and passing up the bodega for the trendy coffee shop down the block. Personally, I'd never been torn on the issue of gentrification until I had my own business (no points to anyone guessing what side I'd traditionally taken). But now I know that, as much as I appreciate my neighbors, they're not the people who might buy the art I sell. They love to come in and ask questions, but when they ask the price, they generally nod knowingly and say something like "Oh that seems reasonable" or "Is that all?" right before they make their excuses and carry on their way. (And I'm aware of the responsibility for my choice to sell work the neighbors can't afford...it's too complicated to explain here though.)
Then there's the comfort factor for the wealthy collectors who will buy work from us. If they're so busy keeping an eye on their car in the street that they don't fall for my sales pitch, what's the point?
So, I feel like a traitor to my working-class values, because more and more I rationalize why gentrification isn't such a bad thing. When two tough, no b.s. developers came in the other day to ask what I thought about the block (they were speculating on a rent-controlled building two doors down), part of me wanted to boot them out into the street, knowing the families living there would soon be displaced if these gents got their hands on the building (all completely legally, they assured me). Part of me, however, thought "Hmmm...more potential clients moving in." I'm still denying myself that extra Manhattan each evening as atonement.
**Normally when we think of the pending "Culture Wars," the issues of traditional values and secular vs. religious viewpoints come to mind, but this article touched on the complexity of those issues within our own political spectrum and the climate worldwide. Not too long ago a blogger argued that we'll know the war on Islamism is over when you see women in bikinis in Saudi Arabia. This quote from the Brooklyn article made me think of that:
When the Hasidim balked at an idea for an enclosed swimming pool because people in bathing suits might step out onto the sidewalk, that plan was discarded, he said, adding that a rabbi from the community gave the project his blessing.
I want to quip snarkily something like "We might need to re-import some of our exported tolerance from the Middle East, once we get it established there" but I think there's a more fundamental Culture War issue here: What is the overriding goal for each side in the Culture War? Inclusivity seems to be the progressives' goal; exclusivity seems to be the traditionalists' goal. But where does that leave groups that need exclusivity to live their lives they way they want to? Should they be able to fight the onslaught of progressive-minded barbarians at the gate, or is that Un-American?
***The central dispute in this article is the one over the Gretsch Building in Williamsburg. What the NYTimes didn't report is that this building was at one time occupied almost entirely by "starving artists." At a time when no one else would consider that building and the neighborhood was quite dangerous, artists risked it. About 5 years ago the Hasidic owner (who would sell it to the developers) started a series of inhumane tortures to get those artists out, turning off their electricity and other utilities and generally harrassing them until they left. It was a rather large scandal in the art community for years, as it was the artists who (like often is the case) made the neighborhood more desirable. For Hasidic activists to now protest what the renovation of this building is doing to their neighborhood is one thing...for them to lay the blame on artists (who a Hasidic landlord forced out so he could turn a pretty profit) is a classic case of chutzpah.
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