Jackie Battenfield Lecture in Peekskill, Tuesday, Oct 6, 7pm.

Jackie Battenfield, artist and author of An Artist's Guide:  Making a Living doing What you Love will be speaking tomorrow night, Oct 6, at 7pm at the Westchester Community College Center for Digital Arts in Peekskill, NY.

Admission is $5.

Ms. Battenfield's book came out this Summer, and though I haven't read it, I've seen it referred to extensively around the blogospher. In fact, Ed Winkleman happened to mention it on his blog again today.  Joanne Mattera whose Marketing Mondays are full of good information has both highlighted the book (for which she was interviewed) and interviewed the author in that weekly segment.

The Center for Digital Arts is located at 27 N Division in Peekskill.  914-606-7304

Art Tarts

Alejandro Dron forwarded me a link to this odd site. Fast women, loose cars and tapping some fine art booty, that's leading a life of affluence and influence is all about. Perhaps Eliot could have been saved from a world of hurt if his browser had taken him to this Emperor's Club page .

Fine is the line between the lovely young thing selling sexual favors and the desperate artist pitching his/her deepest inner most essence in a visual form. Unfortunately the for the artist, there's a decidedly different marketability between the two commodities, and it's not in the artist's favor.
Fortunately, there are some maykrs within our discipline who venture forth in the face of such indifference, creating their work in an unapologetic and uncompromising way; like this guy. So unique is his form of practice, and so obviously committed to this aesthetic program is he, that I think he'd certainly scoff at any suggestion that he pander to some patron or audience by, say, using brushes or putting on some pants.

Arts as Impetus for Successful Redevelopment Pt. 2 at HVCCA March 30

On March 30, HVCCA will be hosting a second panel discussion examining Art as Impetus for Successful Redevelopment. The panel will be held from 4-6pm with a reception to follow.
The panel will be moderated by Janet Langsam, Executive Director of the Westchester Arts Council and former Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York.
Panel Participants are Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and at New York University. Ralph DiBart, City re-development consultant and currently Executive Director of the New Rochelle BID. For more information on the talk, click here.

I attended HVCCA's first discussion on this subject held on Oct. 5, 2007. That talk was sparsely attended, but it did draw individuals from a range of Hudson Valley communities on both sides of the river.
Panelists in that discussion included Maider Bilbao, the museum's artist in residence at the time, who gave an enlightening account of the effect of the Bilbao Guggenhiem on the cultural life of Bilbao. From Maider's point of view, the economic effect of the tourist draw of the museum has primarily focused on the tourist sector, and there has been little benefit to the broader cultural or even economic activity in the city.
Also on the October panel were Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, Art Consultant & Director of Works of Art for Public Spaces and Linda Lees, Founder of Creative Cities International. I really wanted to hear more from Ms. Lees as I felt she has a particularly strong comprehension of the mechanisms within these processes, unfortunately there wasn't enough time for her to really dig in. The most clarifying and striking thing she said was that it is the development of culture, which may include the arts, but not only the arts, that can bring about a successful redevelopment of a community. It's an easy, cliff notes assumption, particularly after Bilbao, to think that all a community need do is plop an art institution in its midst and let the healing begin. Any such endeavor, if it's intended to turn the fate of a city must take into account the existing population, and work to create programs and institutions that serve that population in addition to drawing visitors with destination attractions. Both Maider's reflection on Bilbao from a local artist's viewpoint and Linda Lees comments demonstrated the nuanced complexities of revitalizing communities.
Conversations on this subject are difficult. At once, it's a fascinating topic, and a potentially frustrating one. There are now and have been many groups of people in stagnant cities around the country placing their hopes on such a culture/art centric strategy for the betterment of their own situation and that of their respective cities. The topic is interesting from an analytical standpoint, but when coupled with the peoples' hope and desperation for improvement, such a discussion becomes stunted by the pressure of frustration and impatience. Frustration flared at one point during the Oct. panel as a couple of Peekskill residents vented about Peekskill's intransigent government and that city's long floundering attempts to engender an art driven economic renaissance.
This art thing simply is not a panacea, and in some locations perhaps, hope may float, but art don't. That's where Linda Lees comments on the development of cultural institutions that are both attractive to visitors and new residents, but support the traits of the community as it exists.
I just get this sense that some folks think, well, if it worked there, it's gotta work here. Well, no not necessarily, and perhaps that city whose success on which their basing their expectations may not be as successful as expected for those anticipated reasons.
I equate this to people who read Malcom Gladwell's book The Tipping Point and come away with the empowered sense that "Yes, I understand the dynamics of trends, and I know I have the power to make this such and such trend happen for me." I enjoyed the book greatly, and reading it makes you (me) feel like everything is so clear and obvious. I see references to the book made to tout the potential of one scheme or another, but I've yet to see the roster of companies which have boomed or trends that have skyrocketed precisely because the producers of those efforts applied the examples from the book to engineer series of conditions to make the right bubbling processes happen.

"Art as an Impetus for Successful Re-Development", A panel discussion at HVCCA

On Friday, Oct 5 at 6pm, HVCCA in Peekskill will be hosting a panel discussion called "Art as an Impetus for Successful Re-Development."

Speakers on the panel include Maider Bilbao Echeverria (HVCCA's Summer '07 Artist-In-Residence), Linda Lees (Founder of Creative Cities International), and Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz (Art Consultant & Director of Works of Art for Public Spaces).
From HVCCA's website:

Since the clean up of the Hudson River began in earnest some years ago, many
river towns have struggled with regaining economic stability. Areas dependent on
forms of production that were not considered environmentally hostile closed,
creating pockets of unemployment and resultant urban blight. Artists have
historically moved into struggling areas as affordable economic sites. They have
beautified locations left abandoned by others, creating communities that are
exemplars of the potential of rejuvenation. Many towns and communities along the
Hudson River can be seen as case studies for the successes and failures of this
transformative trend. Urban centers from Chelsea to Yonkers, Ossining,
Peekskill, Haverstraw, Tarrytown, Beacon, Poughkeepsie and Hudson, to name just
a few, are experiencing a revival through envisioning their communities as
artists' havens and locations for museums and arts organizations.

The city of Bilbao in the Basque area of Spain will be discussed as a model that has
experienced enormous economic and community revitalization (now commonly
referred to as the "Bilbao Effect") through the arts and, in particular, the
establishment of the Guggenheim Bilbao, a museum complex that is a locus for
international tourism.

Price
HVCCA Members: $7.50
Non-Members: $10.00
Students: $5.00

Art's economic impact on NY state

The Alliance for the Arts has released a report on the economic impact that the "Arts" industry has in NY state. The total impact of the various components that make up the Arts Industry is $25.7 billion. Of the 5 slices that make up the entire arts pie, the motion picture/television activities in the state account for the largest contributing segment, followed closely by the chunk represented by the "Non profit culture" which covers museums, performing and visual art entities, historical societies and all sorts other non profit activities. The third larges component is the "Arts motivated visitor," tourists coming in from elsewhere to experience the arts. Commercial theater and art galleries/ auction houses comprise the 2 smallest slices.

The numbers seem huge for certain, and the report seems to be rather thorough in regard to the data culled from the source surveys, but I think that it would be useful to place these findings in a very basic relation to the entire volume of NY's economic pie. $25 billion sounds huge, but how does that compare to other statewide industries? They couldn't fit just one additional pie chart into the report? Yes, I know I'm lazy...perhaps I'll indulge my own curiosity and look in to it.

A little later....

Ok, so Wikipedia says that NY's state gross state product from 2005 was $963.5billion. In 2006, NY produced $3.6billion in agricultural product, and NY is the second largest producer of cabbage in the US.
See how a little context can go along way. It's quite clear to me now that art is way, way more important than food.
Of course this simply an apple to art comparison. The calculated impact of the arts industry in the report seems to take into account not only the value of any product produced, but also the total expenditure made by the industry to create the product, or experience that it is pedalling, as well as the amount of tax revenue that's generated by the activity. There is a distinction among the slices of pie that constitute this total impact as well. Of the five sectors, four relate to the economic impact on the production side. The Arts-Motivated Visitor category is the only segment that fully encompasses the consumer side of this equation which equals 22%. So it seems that 78% of the total impact is in the mayking of the goods. Now, the report does state that NY is a cultural exporter, but 80% expenditure versus 20% income.....yeah that sounds about right. So, perhaps NY state is simply filled with hordes of compulsively creative people shoveling their hard earned money into doing things that, feed their compulsions, but not necessarily their pockets.

I am so not an economist, but it seems to me that as detailed a picture of the arts industry as these numbers create, it's simply floating in a vacuum without placing it in the big picture.

Finally, It also seems a stretch to me to continually pair the movie/tele industry so closely with the arts. It's beneficial for the smaller, non profit cultural activities to lash its dingy to the Film tug. Maybe the title of the report should be renamed The Economic Impact of Non-athletic Recreational and or Entertainment Diversion on New York State, or more accurately, The Nature and Scope of the Economic Components that Constitute the Non-athletic Recreational and or Entertainment/Diversion Industry in New York State, the Impact of which on the State Economy Exists, but we Chose not to Quantify the Nature of that Impact in Relation to the Entirety of the State Economy.