I live in Harlem which is not as cool as Brooklyn but enables me to have an enormous one bedroom apartment a block from two express trains.
Being self-conscious about this (I’m afraid that I’m surely missing out on something), I was delighted to read the following passage in Michael Cunningham’s fantastic new book, By Nightfall
Does the fringey urban semi-exile in which most artists live affect their output? Sure, young artists are expected to be poor, they’re supposed to be poor, but the poor artists of other generations lived in Paris, or Berlin, or London, they lived in Greenwich Village. To what extent do the Impressionists exist at all because it was suddenly so much cheaper to leave Paris and go to Provence? Yes, they lived meagerly, but they lived in places of real if sometimes decaying beauty; they lived in cities or villages that could be rough but had no doubts about their ancient profundity, their queenly rights not only to exist but to exult in their own habits and particulars. Bushwick, on the other hand, is pretty close to nowhere. Its founders didn’t take much trouble with it; even the oldest of the buildings were obviously put up as quickly and cheaply as possible. In a place like this, wouldn’t it seem a little…silly to think about producing earnest work that aspired, however imperfectly, to the profound I mean, hello, Bushwick, hello, America, hello, mega-malls and feed lots. Here’s my attempt to slit the skin of mortality and see what glitters on the other side. How embarrassing would that be?
Who was it who said a country gets the government it deserves? Does America get the art it deserves?
