Unethical Plug Disguised as Flimsy Analysis

Keri Oldham, from Recital Shots, 2009

Now I hasten to note that Keri Oldham is one of my best and oldest friends. She's visiting for a few days after Christmas and if I hope she'll stay through New Year's. Anything I say to you about her work will carry the slant of my extraordinary bias for her as a friend for more than a decade and going. So take someone else's word for it! Lanie Delay talked to her for KERA Public Media and the Q&A examines some of the best aspects of her practice, which includes criticism and theater, too.

Pivoting from her work specifically, let me pick up on something she says in the interview: "Galleries closing doesn't mean that there can't be shows." It's interesting to me the way that geography informs this attitude.

As recently as spring this year—when the nation was firmly in the grip of the Great Recession—people back home were still telling me that Dallas (and Houston, and Austin) was recession proof, that home prices were stable and the market was still growing. That may even still be the case today in Houston—I don't know.

But it's a bad scene now in Dallas, where a lot of galleries are being forced to close. In my (admittedly limited) experience living in DFW and writing some reviews when I visit for the Dallas Morning News, the few devoted dealers and artists in Dallas have enjoyed strong support from collectors and the luxury of Chelsea-sized white cube spaces along Dragon Street and elsewhere. This is not to say that the Dallas art market was ever pampered, but it was never forced to rely upon a strong DIY scene to survive. A stable white cube scene has been destabilized and I don't think there's a back burner guerrilla scene in place where artists can rough it out and find support. (At least, not to my knowledge.)

Keri Oldham, SHL, 2009.

Now, in the District, the extraordinary growth over the last decade has attracted a number of people—or better put, retained those people—who come not for jobs in political journalism or the federal government but for jobs in culture and entertainment or with the sort of squishy nonprofit work that allows them to devote a lot of time to do those things. While the District enjoyed the sort of boom that saw white cubes springing up on 14th Street NW, a dedicated collector class—like the kind that well-to-do Dallas has or had—never totally materialized. So even though a few galleries in the District have been forced to close (if only to re-open elsewhere) the Great Recession has not taken a huge psychic toll on D.C. artists—who are all too familiar with the struggle. Game's the same, just got more fierce.

In Philly, to take another example, it seemed as though artists were never able to totally capitalize on the boom. I don't know why. A curator explained to me at a meeting with someone from the National Endowment for the Arts that a lot of our discussion didn't much matter for Philadelphia, because Philadelphia isn't run by grant-requesting arts nonprofits—but rather loose collectives, revolving-door fun-scene kids. I would totally guess that's the same for Baltimore. I don't know whether money didn't coalesce into a certain sort of professionalization here because of something attitudinal about the city or because the money was never there. Either way, Philly's art scene looks from all appearances unchanged. Same with Baltimore.

That's maybe wrong in the case of Philadelphia, but put another way, there is an infrastructure to help artists survive the Recession that is more developed in Philly and Baltimore than in D.C. and much more so than in DFW.