“2012 U.S. Cities Contemporary Art Rankings: A New Hierarchical Approach” / An Art Of This One Nighter event by me, Andy Sturdevant. This Tuesday!
For decades, artists have wondered: is New York really America’s only truly world-class art center, or has L.A. become its peer? Is Minneapolis actually a more rewarding place to make a career as an artist than other Midwestern cities like St. Louis or Kansas City? Does the influence of Harrell Fletcher in Portland and current widespread interest in social practice make that city a bonafide contemporary art capital? Is the relative lack of a traditional arts infrastructure in a city like Detroit offset by the influx of young artists that have moved there in the past ten years? Can it be said that San Francisco is a “better” place to be an artist than, say, Boston? And speaking of the Bay Area, does Oakland constitute a separate, equally influential art center entity apart from San Francisco proper? Or is SF-Oakland one unified, coherent single scene? What about Brooklyn? Or Queens? Is Miami national grade all year-round, or just when Art Basel is going on?
For decades, these questions had no definitive answers.
After Tuesday night, however, they will.
Tomorrow night at 7 p.m., at Art Of This (4 East Franklin Avenue at Nicollet) as part of their One Nighter series, I convene a group of artists, writers, gallery-goers and arts patrons — including you. Together, using only an easel pad, markers, a map, proven junk sociological methods, and our own collective knowledge, we will collaboratively place each of America’s 125 largest metropolitan statistical areas into a five-tiered hierarchy that will definitively answer, once and for all, where every major U.S. city, from New York City (#1) to Reading, PA (#125) stands in the eyes of the contemporary art world today. A book detailing the group’s findings, complete with dozens of charts, will be published in early 2012.
Join the conversation!
