Guts, Gumption, Gold, and Glory

The UGLY WINNERS one night art show in the upstairs apartment came off without a hitch. It was a great success, well-attended, and positively received. There was only one problem: we didn't sell a single thing. That wasn't the sole objective of the show - I was more concerned with giving unrepresented artists a chance to share their work and meet one another - but it still would've been nice. See - art shows, book fairs, and the like act as catalysts for artistic production - or more accurately, they provide the threat of a deadline, which is always a powerful motivator. But what if all that motivation turned action turned product has nowhere to go? A visual artist can only produce so much without having a market for his work (unless he's lucky enough to have a massive studio or a warehouse - or he makes really tiny work). A glut of work also threatens to devalue individual pieces (it's just supply and demand). And not even just the exchange value - I'm thinking more of artists, bands, and writers that have no "filter" and produce album after album, novel after novel, poem after poem, painting after painting, etc. It skews overall value, or what I might term reception value. I don't know about you, but this wide-net approach to cultural production has always left a bad taste in my mouth. Like if you throw enough at the wall, something's bound to stick, but it doesn't matter what it is. Anyway, the show was a great idea. And I want to have more. But it left me wondering, how many can I have before all the artists' homes are just full of unsold work? How long could we all go on making things, filling our closets, dragging things out and dusting them off, even contemplating throwing them out in order to make room for new things?

Polaroids by Jay Stankiewicz

It also left me wondering about the turbulent economy (which I know has already become a cliche) and the effect it will have on luxury spending, because I do consider the purchase of art a luxury. Or more accurately, I understand that the purchase of art is regarded by a large percentage of the population as superfluous to human needs. People in the Rust Belt/Great Lakes Region have been the victims of a vicious economic vortex for over 5 decades now - so it's not as though there's been a time in recent memory when luxury spending was the norm - but is this recent collapse going to make things even worse? In short, did I pick the worst possible time to try to become a working artist and help promote my friends' work?

The upstairs living room during UGLY WINNERS.

Maybe. But maybe not. I've been buoyed by a recent article that touts Buffalo as one of the top places in the nation to "ride out the recession."

Buffalo's terrible economy shelters it from the benefits of economic booms, but it also makes us almost impervious to the negative effects of economic downturns. Things have always been bad here, we're not really going to notice if things "get worse." In fact, our economic turmoil has cultivated an insularity that's allowing us to move independent of the global crisis. Slowly but surely, even now, our home prices are rising. Employment is on the upswing. Consumer spending is level. Home foreclosures are a fraction of what they are elsewhere. Things out there in the world might be ugly, but here on the economic island that is Buffalo, they're the same, or even improving.

Kit Bowman's "Most Colorful Primate."

Maybe, just maybe, people in Buffalo have already worked luxury spending into their very limited budgets. So I probably have nothing to worry about. At least from a consumer standpoint. From a production perspective, however, things are looking less healthy.

Chris Fritton's "Basic Standing Dive."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sinking yet. But tightening my purse strings in order to ride out this transition has made progress on the studio space in the garage slow. In fact, it's stopped almost completely because I'm at a point where I need an electrician to come and connect the building to the grid, install a breaker box, and get everything up and running. Luckily the building is wired already, but it's still going to cost a significant amount to get the work done. A significant amount I don't have right now. This was a terrible disappointment (the first major one since I started this project) because I envisioned using the space and time over the winter to produce a number of larger pieces and begin marketing them. Luckily I will have a heated space to work; a close friend is going to Europe from January to April, so I'm going to sublet her huge studio while she's gone.

Untitled painting by BREZO

In the meantime, I'm going to have to focus on writing (I'm putting the finishing touches on a new book entitled "Occupation: Housewife" right now) and teaching (I've landed an intermittent gig with the local non-profit Just Buffalo to teach afterschool and in-school programs in poetry and writing) because I've run out of room for other work.