Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York

New York City can no longer sustain any but the wealthiest artists and is suffering as a result, according to this uneven debut account from Kosut, a sociology professor at SUNY Purchase. She places much of the blame for the erosion of New York’s artistic community on gentrification, which she herself experienced as housing costs pushed her from Williamsburg to Bushwick to Ridgewood (“I’m one of the gentrifiers who hung on long enough to get gentrified”). Profiling a number of artists trying to make it in the city, she identifies an “underclass” of those who work in such “art-adjacent” careers as museum security and art handling. They provide the art world’s essential labor yet often find their efforts to sell their own art or find representation undermined by condescending elites (as one art handler explains, “It’s like, ‘Oh, don’t talk to the help’ ”). Ending on a mixed note, Kosut emphasizes artists’ critical role in the city’s ecosystem (“We need bees to pollinate the foods we’ve come to expect.... Likewise, we need artists to pollinate New York, to fertilize and piss all over it”) while implying that efforts to reverse current trends may be in vain (“We may be coming to the end of an era in which artist is synonymous with urban”). Kosut digs into a pressing and complex social issue, though readers may be turned off by the unremittingly gloomy picture she paints (“In the new New York, mediocrity is the new black”). This misses the mark. (July)