It does sort of make a looney kind of sense to think of artists as an ethnic group. Clearly the stereotyping is there.
Bet ya wouldn't want yer daughter to marry one.

Don't quite get the "benign" part, though.

Maybe that's true in part for producers of "fine art," but NYC is also a media capital, and media is almost as much of an economic engine for the city as the finance industry, and the media are consumed by everyone.

I'm not even sure what parasitic animal to compare finance workers to...

Ai, ai, ai, who buys the work of "cultural workers"? The NYC metro area is a center of culture because it is a financial center, not despite it. Another way of looking at it is that the "cultural workers" are the pilot fishes of the folks that work in financial services.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_fish

It's a tough competition, those whom you saw were only the best in the world. They're some of the very few who can do this:

judging from some of the ridiculous apartments i walked through during that recent artist studio tour of JC it seems like not all artists are starving.

I can"t get over the meat market area. Here is an article from today:

Home values rise again in New York

The rise in values buck the national trend
NY home sale trend

Posted: Wednesday, November 07, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) -- There apparently aren't many bargains in the real estate market in New York City.

A report released Wednesday by the Real Estate Board of New York says the average sales price for a New York dwelling climbed to $782,000 in the third quarter. That's an increase of 20 percent over the same period a year earlier.

Prices were highest in Manhattan, where the average home sold for more than 1.3 million dollars, or around $1,176 per square foot. The cost of a home went up in every borough except Staten Island, which saw a nearly 3-percent drop.

Nationwide, home prices have been falling because of turmoil in the credit markets, worries about rising defaults of subprime mortgages and an oversupply of housing in some markets.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

I was just happy we got a mention. and they spelled our name right!

Quote:

I don't see anything in the article that implies that - you sound a bit defensive.

WOW nothing like another nyc media outlet saying extremely snobish shit towards nj. The whole pretense of this article is that jersey city is such a dump that gentrification should never here. wtf

EXCERPT:
"... real estate has priced cultural workers off the island. It?s sent them out to Williamsburg ? what are they calling Flatbush, now, East Williamsburg? Dumbo. Jersey City. Money?s chasing them from there. When an artist can?t even afford to live in Jersey City anymore, we can say that the city as a cultural engine has been killed by what?s going on.?

=================================================

Gentrification as ?Benign Ethnic Cleansing?

By Sewell Chan
New York Times
November 7

If there is a leitmotif this year among scholars and writers who study New York, it is the reshaping of Manhattan by the forces of wealth and gentrification ? and the angst accompanying those forces. There have been books on the ?suburbanization? of New York, panel discussions on whether the city has lost its soul and reports about the flurry of bank branch construction.

Now a new addition to the literature has just been published: an edited collection titled ?New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg.? The book?s editors, Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, spoke on a panel discussion Tuesday night in the Recital Hall of the City University of New York Graduate Center. The event was organized by the Gotham Center for New York City History.

Professor Berman?s introduction to the book traces the collapse of New York in the 1960s and ?70s and the city?s financial recovery in the ensuing decades. A political theorist, Professor Berman takes a measured view of the changes in New York. He writes:

If I were 40 years younger than I am, and trying to come to New York now, high on brains, ambition, and energy but low on capital, could I come here? Well, yes and no. There would be no way I could afford the Upper West Side. Probably no more than 10 per cent of West Siders could afford the West Side ? or indeed any any Manhattan neighborhood ? if we had to pay market prices to be here now. That?s the bad news. The good news is that today?s younger generation, unable to live in Manhattan, has learned to explore the city as a whole with a zeal and energy and resourcefulness that my generation, obsessed with Manhattan alone, never even dreamed of.

Mr. Berger ? a poet, journalist and photographer ? wrote introductory essays for the book?s three sections: Public Spaces, City Life and the Things We Do. He takes a ?slightly less miraculous? approach, he said, than Professor Berman. Two other contributors to the book spoke next: Tom Robbins, the Village Voice journalist who has covered the city for three decades, and Joseph Anastasio, a writer, photographer, programmer and former graffiti artist who runs the Web site LTV Squad.

But it was John Strausbaugh, the author and occasional Times contributor, who really stole the show. He devoted his essay in the book to the demise of the cultural and creative community in Manhattan, which he believes is being driven out by ever-more-expensive housing, but his remarks went well beyond what?s in the book.

The effects of the skyrocketing housing prices have not been seen yet. Like a slowly dying cactus, Mr. Strausbaugh said, it may take 10 years for Manhattan?s cultural scene to become apparent. And he offered this analysis:

I am kind of concerned about what?s going on in Manhattan ? maybe not New York City generally, but certainly Manhattan. I think a city is a living organism, a giant living organism. It?s a lot more than the sum of its buildings, its infrastructure, its highways. You?d be hard pressed to convince planners, architects, real estate agents of that, but it is. It?s the human beings in a city that give it its character, that give it its culture.

Mr. Strausbaugh grew up in Baltimore and moved to New York in 1990. ?I came here to be among the people,? he said. ?Lower Manhattan, 14th Street down, was a cultural generator for world culture for well over 100 years. That?s gone. That?s over. And it?s needed basically because the real estate has priced cultural workers off the island. It?s sent them out to Williamsburg ? what are they calling Flatbush, now, East Williamsburg? Dumbo. Jersey City. Money?s chasing them from there. When an artist can?t even afford to live in Jersey City anymore, we can say that the city as a cultural engine has been killed by what?s going on.?

Mr. Strausbaugh said he can foresee a response: ??Shut up. It?s a much nicer cleaner city. I don?t care that rapists don?t live here anymore. And that?s a valid thing to say back to me.? But ultimately, he said, something irreplaceable will be lost if Manhattan becomes only a city of money:

It was inconceivable that you would come to a Manhattan that is only a Manhattan of people of money, and only a business Manhattan. Part of what made Manhattan unique in the whole world was the mix, the mix of people. What?s kind of going on now is a benign ethnic cleansing of the borough of Manhattan, and that mix is going to be gone for a very long time.

Mr. Strausbaugh continued about Manhattan: ?It used to be a place that attracted young creative people from all over the world and it did that for a long long time. I?m not sure it?s still doing that. All the cultural workers I know live in Brooklyn.?

And why is dispersal so bad? He added, ?The more you spread out ? so some of you are in Astoria, some of you are in Flatbush, some of you are in Jersey City ? the less you?re going to be bumping into each other day every day, connecting with each other.?

Not everyone shared Mr. Strausbaugh?s pessimism.

Professor Berman, for one, cited a ?tremendous liveliness in a great many neighborhoods ? in Brooklyn, Queens and now even the Bronx ? that there wasn?t when I was growing up.? Mr. Robbins, whose essay in the book traces the career of Herman Badillo, expressed hope that talented minority politicians might still succeed in becoming New York?s next generation of leaders. (He said he didn?t think the Gristede?s supermarket magnate John A. Catsimatidis, who is weighing a mayoral run, will succeed. ?If everyone who shops at Gristede?s votes in the next election, I don?t think John Catsimatidis has a chance,? Mr. Robbins quipped.)

Inevitably, the subject of Rudolph W. Giuliani came up. Mr. Robbins said: ?Do I pine for the old New York? Yeah, I do. I do pine for an old New York that preceded Giuliani, who turned the city into a fortress and turned the public discourse about the city?s politics so much more tense and difficult.? Mr. Robbins said he was willing to give Mr. Giuliani some credit, but by no means all of it, for the improvements in quality of life in the ?90s.

Mike Wallace, the historian who leads the Gotham Center, wondered aloud whether the seemingly calm politics of the last few years will prove to be an aberration:

We?re in this kind of mild, benign, seemingly post-political moment, maybe because we are riding an economic wave of, it seems to be, a dubious basis. If the response to the subprime crisis in fact continues and expands, we?re looking at the possibility of 1973 starting all over again. If that happens, are these cultures going to be cross-fertilizing or at each other?s throats?

The funniest moment of the evening? At one point, Professor Berman?s cellphone rang loudly and he answered it.

?Don?t worry, it?s Judi Nathan,? Mr. Robbins quipped, referring to Mr. Giuliani?s famous decision to take his wife?s cellphone call during a speech to the National Rifle Association.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/200 ... nign-ethnic-cleansing/?hp