New Yorkers have been complaining about gentrification forever, but the pace of change during the past several years in downtown, especially on the West Side, has been startling… well, to be honest, it’s almost deplorable. The saddest thing to see is the way the meatpacking district has changed in the past few years. It’s easier to spot celebrities than a rat these days, and it’s been a while since we have lost sight of transsexual hookers on Washington Street.
My best friend T used to say “You got to have germs to make art.” The city, like underdeveloped countries, is still filled with all kinds of infectious germs, but the species that T used to mention, the kinds that nourished art, are almost extinct. I miss the days when artists, hookers and drug dealers were all under the same roof. It was thrilling, and art was much more powerful back then.
It’s ironic to think something positive about this change when it’s making me feel like a fish trapped in a drying pond, but if there is one good thing that has come out of this horrendous gentrification, it is that the city has become a nice place for kids to grow up in. My biggest dilemma these days … I want germs for myself, but not for my kids. Having a family is not simple.
(Here is another irony. T, who was homeless and couldn’t tell the difference between a shooting gallery and an art gallery when we used to hang out together, is now a professor at one of the ivys, and his two kids go to one of the best private schools in the city.)
You are absolutely right… NYC has lost it’s soul and edge.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this question and feel moved to respond.
I grew up in NYC and remember well the thrilling times you talk about. I, too, am nostalgic for that rich and fertile artistic ground.
And yet: Let us think about what exactly germs are, the germs that cause disease or that can make creativity a necessary response. While the dirt and crime and drug use, the hookers and muggers, the sidewalk 3-card monte games, the graffiti and the stench, may have all but disappeared–isn’t our city now perhaps more diseased than ever?
Except today it’s not infectious diseases, but diseases of surfeit and complacency, apathy and over-ease that we have to combat. In a figurative sense, we may not have to worry about AIDS and tuberculosis anymore; instead, we must worry about diabetes and obesity.
I think that while the city may have a clean face, there are dark and dangerous forces at work within it, and within American society at large. It is our responsibility as artists to respond to them. And that is where NYC’s next artistic jolt will come from.
I don’t know if that makes sense, but there it is.
Germs and art…beauty and pain. One brings out the other, yes? Life is not just meaningless without struggle, it is unliveable. Like the chick who will die if it is “helped” out of the egg as it struggles to free itself, so too, perhaps, art is the spirit’s immune response to life’s germs. Very interesting topic and posts!
As we are on the topic of stimulating the ‘art response’, I would like to share with you two of my favorite quotes on the subject…
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Pablo Picasso
“Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out. ” – Henri Matisse.
French would say … without germs you don’t have cheese and other good stuff in their kitchen. I read sometime ago an article about the smell produced by different bacterias/germs in the lab. And not all of them were unpleasent, on the contrary (violet, rosy, woody, etc).
“Germs to make art”. I,too,got infected with it when I was in NYC. It doesn’t extinct so easily, they just spread out all over the world. I’m carrier(LOL).
Here is my suggestion. How about to have imaginary friend who is an artist, also doing hooker and drug dealer at the same time. She(or he) could be a muse!
Anyway, I kinda like this photo. It doesn’t have any noise but I could hear the music.
At a cellular level germs can be beautiful. On a nutritional level foods like keifer, yogurt, cheese and other products help to keep us alive.