David Byrne

 Just to preface, I may have a bit of a bias because of my previous love for David Byrne. However, I feel like this piece hit the nail right on the head, despite some of what I felt to be capitalist rhetoric regarding business and development. New York City can be a magical place, especially for an up and coming artist, in regards to garnering inspiration, connections, etc. Thus, artists have flocked to the city for decades now. While this has proven to launch many artists into amazing success, there are several disturbing factors at play. First, gentrification in New York is completely out of control, leaving people of color and underprivileged groups to extreme violence and further poverty. Tracing back lineage of this process, for example in Brooklyn, one will find that the onset of this neo-colonialism was brought about by artists finding their way into cheap or abandoned housing. What follows are developers and entrepreneurs that then capitalize on the process as the art community has done a great deal of the work for them. Now, several of said neighborhoods are chalk full of millionaires, and expensive restaurants. Not only has this happened in NYC, but this process is taking place all of the country right now. It is our responsibility as artists (especially as white artists) to take it upon ourselves to ACTIVELY fight gentrification as are actions in particular neighborhoods can ultimately lead to extreme violence and alienation.
  Another issue with NYC importing so many artists is that it becomes very disempowering for art communities in other places. I know so many artists that were working in DFW for example who left to areas such as Portland, SF, or NYC because of the expectation that existing in those places would ultimately make them more successful. While that is rarely working for folks anymore, it becomes very difficult to create a thriving art community in a place like Denton or Dallas when artists aren't willing to put in the work to create it on their own. Yes, that work is hard and sometimes you feel like you're in a fucking desert when you work in places like this, but what I've found from putting on independent shows here and encouraging local artists to become empowered in the place that they are - is that it is so much more exhilarating and rewarding at the end of the day to have built something, created something new. And that's what we do as artists right? Take a blank canvass and turn it into something beautiful and its time that we see the communities that we already live in as that canvass.