Outside the Republic

I recently moved to a neighborhood filled with artists, writers, more artists, a couple restaurants, even more artists, and some project buildings from the second half of the 20th century. It is a small neighborhood and only a few blocks in any direction you will find that only some of the streetlights work, that random piles of broken glass and televisions do not get swept away, and other such details that keep  many from moving here yet.

Most of the people I know who moved here did so for the cheap rent that permit them to dedicate themselves to their art. I am here to share my life with one of those crazy people. As Socrates said, poets don't belong in the republic–and whether because they are corrupting or for other reasons certainly we live in a society that does not make an artist's life possible–so they left the island republic of Manhattan and found themselves living among other outcasts, a strange and awkward community. They were willing to accept the increased crime rate, discomforts of living in industrial "lofts" for the ability to be able to create their work away from the republic which rejected them. Uncomfortable though at first, inevitably local strongholds formed so that individual outcasts did become friends, support each other's projects, interests, dreams, and load trucks, shows, vans with lights, wood, art work and alcohol for the after party.

That was the neighborhood.

Then rents went up as young art students, transients, came for the summer or the year. The amenities didn't improve but the prices changed. A restaurant got reviewed by the New Yorker, the New York Times, another by the London Financial Times. Everyone sighed. Things changed but at least it was local businesses that were succeeding. And then last week, a gallery opened. 

A big gallery. A gallery that took around 12,000 square feet, invited or purchased all their super-tall, gorgeous models for the opening, and showed works that had nothing to do with, nor were from, the neighborhood.

At first I was confused. After all, we had been the original gentrifiers, so how could we rightly complain that this large public gallery was coming in and starting the neighborhood change? They were simply economizing on what we had begun. Right? Or so I thought for the last five days.

Not until I found myself arguing about Oscar Wilde's The Critic as an Artist as a miffed, sarcastic, funny reply to Plato's The Republic did I begin to see the problem with this reasoning. The poets were rejected from the republic and willingly wandered away to produce their work elsewhere because, after all, who is going to take time to fight the republic where there are paintings, poems, plays, films, sculptures, sonnets to create that are worthwhile for one's own self, whether the republic recognizes them or not as productive, profitable material. So the outcasts wandered, here, there, and some number settled here. Years go by, more people settle here, and it is not so dangerous as before, the trains run somewhat regularly, and living here has become, in its uncomfortable and uncomfortably bohemian way, relatively comfortable.

At which point, the politicians and merchants and families from the republic look over and say: well, gee that looks like a good place! And so they come in droves with strollers, trend-setting political statement bags, and overpriced boutiques because they can rent from landlords who are...the same vilified landlords elsewhere so I shalln't go into that here. But wait a minute! The republic asked all those artists to leave, if not literally as Socrates would have by claiming their ideas were poisonous, then by virtue of making it impossible for them to live there financially, and some might argue socially too. So then why is the republic moving here, to them?

The artists had just gotten settled into their studios–it takes years to build it out so that it functions in just the right way. Move...again?

Maybe not this year or the next...but sometime soon when the republic remembers that actually the poets don't belong in the republic. And this is now a part of the republic so those strange people need to go. That is usually around the time that it notices the philosophers, the critics, who have been discussing, and even (poor Socrates!) writing, about the hypocrisy of the current republic. We know the philosophers are not king. No, they are not even knights. They are scoundrels, dissidents and need to depart. The critic has been too creative in pondering the complexities of the community and, as with the artist, must out. So they, the critics, and the artists wander away again. Because the republic is strong. It is at any rate always stronger than the creative exuberance, haphazard pleasure of the lunatics, lovers and poets.

If some artists make it in the republic, then power to them. But most don't. So when the first major gallery comes to the neighborhood, the reason that the locals are not happy is for the simple reason that it sounds the death toll. The neighborhood will die, the sweet enclave where productivity was a creativity, where it could occur without the calculations of the market watch, will disappear. Like Soho, sure, but like all of Manhattan, like the Left Bank but like all of Paris, and now, like here.