Campaigners in Los Angeles have coined a new term to stop galleries opening in poor areas. Do they want to keep urban communities segregated?
When you hear the word culture, do you reach for your copy of Das Kapital?
Some anti-gentrification protesters do. In one of the daftest and most perverse logics of the modern left, campaigners in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of Los Angeles say that while they are “not against art and culture”, they see the art galleries opening in their streets as part of the problem. According to activist Maga Miranda, “the art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification.”
Artwashing. What a great new political watchword. As in, watch out that your neighbourhood doesn’t get “artwashed” too. Just look how Tate Modern has wrecked London and how the Guggenheim trashed Bilbao. Get away, ye galleries! Let’s keep urban wastelands as bleak as they already are!
It’s a neat reversal of the thinking that has seen cities all over the world embrace art galleries, museums and biennials in pursuit of regeneration. The wisdom of the 1990s, epitomised by the building of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim on the rundown industrial riverside of Bilbao, was that art and architecture attracts tourism, business, hotels and restaurants, and can give a city new life, new hope.
Was it all an illusion? ....