Let’s have our (unexclusively capitalist) cake and eat it, too
I wrote a quick piece in this week’s Uniter on branding the Exchange District as a trendy district for commerce, the limits of top-down neighborhood branding, and on the phony conflict between the artistic pioneers and the more commercial interests represented by the Exchange District Business Improvement Zone (BIZ). This accompanies a news feature on Dr. Sonia Bookman’s research on branding in the Exchange, and the supposed efforts to stifle the spontaneous and artistic side of the Exchange in it’s post-wholesale, post-sweatshop incarnation.
To Dr. Bookman, branding “is facilitated by BIZ programs for graffiti removal, designated poster boards that restrict where posters can spring up, further management of Old Market Square park and the presence of BIZ foot patrols.
These programs, according to Bookman, help emphasize the most consumable aspects of culture, like niche retail and restaurants, while marginalizing many of the spontaneous street artists and performers who were instrumental in creating the neighbourhood’s unique cultural identity to begin with.”
Um, when was street art ever anything but marginalized? It certainly was marginalized a decade ago, the supposed gold old days when artists had the whole neighborhood to themselves. Even then, the Exchange District BIZ was hard at work above the Glass Onion Cafe, and those designated poster boards were there long before a few Fine Arts grads decided it would be fun to move in and be street artists.
Anyway, let’s say street art and performances were to become un-marginalized; totally supported by the Exchange District BIZ or some other organization. Well, there goes your edge, your spontaneity, your ungovernable creativity…
And while I’m not crazy about them generally, BIZ groups operate largely on contributions by—and for the sake of—their members: local businesses. Of course the Exchange BIZ is going to use their limited resources to support programming that (supposedly) benefits their members, rather than to buy yarn or spray paint for artists or whatever.
Earlier this Fall, the Uniter had a great feature (and a comment piece of mine) on the importance of small businesses in the Exchange, and the uphill battles with brainless bureaucracy that entrepreneurs must fight in order to get their ventures off the ground. As someone with several friends who took huge financial risks opening businesses in the Exchange, it is hard not to feel a little put off by the elitist warning that a business is ok, as long as it is not “explicitly capitalist” in its approach.
At what point does a business go from being a Great Local Business where one can upload photos of their breakfast to Instagram, to being a monstrous, “exclusively commercial” interest? Do we determine this by quarterly sales? The type of wares they carry? Or by the clientele they attract? (Socially-consious hipsters, yes; any other kind of middle class white person, no.)
If artists in the Exchange are so selflessly about community, maybe they could learn to live with their new neighbors a little better. Trust me, as someone who appreciates gritty and honest urbanity to polished and put-on pablum, the Exchange District is a much better place today than it was a decade ago.
