I found this really thoughtful essay one of the Muse artists wrote, remembering her experience there. It asks lots of questions I ask all the time, expresses many of the feelings I have. Where do the artists go when the developers come? Why, as an artist, do I feel marginalized in our culture? Why in our world is the value of art expressed in economic terms?
It's a sad cycle. Artists move into a poor neighborhood or abandoned industrial complex because it's a cheap place to live and work. Being artists, they make it beautiful. A place everyone wants to be. Rents go up. Being poor, not all artists were lucky enough to buy their studios, they just rented them... so they struggle more and more to get by. Then the developers see how hip the place has become, and it's all over. The Muse gets bulldozed and multi-million-dollar condos go up. Artists move away and start the cycle all over again somewhere else, while somebody else profits from what they started.
I struggle with living in our economy as a creative, artistic person. I find myself spending more time figuring out how to handle money than creating things, because I get to thinking that if I can figure out how to handle money well, I can spend more time creating things. If we can get out of debt, spend less, make something extra here or there... it feels like a sickness sometimes, probably because it is... the curse, the fields of time filled with weeds, the biggest and tallest of which bears the name `mortgage' or `rent'.
I'm really sad for the Muse. I'm really sad for artists who struggle so much in our economy, because our economy doesn't value art per se, but how much profit it can generate. But how shall we define the value of art? How do we live out that value? What does it look like to bring freedom to artists enslaved to economics? Where is Jesus in all this? |