From the e-flux archive
In recent months, the relationship between contemporary art, real estate, housing, gentrification, and the material conditions of artists’ lives has returned to public discussion. These questions are not new. Over the past two decades, e-flux has published a substantial body of writing on the ways culture becomes entangled with property, finance, labor, and urban policy. Throughout August, e-flux Notes brings eight of these texts back into circulation.
The series begins with Martha Rosler’s “Culture Class” and closes with Nina Möntmann’s account of Rosler’s If You Lived Here… It also includes essays by Charles Mudede, Simon Sheikh, Ingo Niermann, David A. Banks, Betty Yu, and Hito Steyerl, originally published in e-flux journal, e-flux Architecture, and e-flux Notes between 2008 and 2022.
The texts look at different cities, moments, and economic arrangements: postwar urban renewal, loft living and the East Village art scene, Seattle after decades of tech-driven development, the privatization of everyday life during the pandemic, housing organized as a subscription service, and the history of migration and displacement in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. They also examine the labor conditions of the art field itself, and the possibility of using an art institution as a form of public and political infrastructure.
Taken together, they complicate the familiar question of whether artists are victims or agents of gentrification. Artists can occupy several positions at once. They may be displaced by rising property values while also contributing, often unintentionally, to the cultural visibility that produces those values. Institutions can become instruments of redevelopment and city branding, but they can also make their spaces and resources available to people and practices usually excluded from them.
The larger forces are not difficult to identify: investors, property owners, municipal policy, platforms, cultural institutions, and labor relations. What is more difficult is to understand how artistic freedom, difference, memory, and collective life become part of the production of economic value. And whether culture can do something other than prepare a place for its own displacement.
These essays were not originally conceived as a series, and they do not always agree. The language and technologies of urban transformation have changed since they were written. The rhetoric of the “creative class” may have faded, but many of the mechanisms described here have become ordinary. Read together now, the texts show why the question of who can inhabit, shape, and remember the city continues to return. Essays in this series will be published every Wednesday and Friday throughout the month of August.
—The Editors
