Who Profits to Nonprofit Art?

Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” [July] was a truly pleasurable trip down memory lane—a guilty pleasure, at that, recalling for me the days of fashionable poverty and gallery internships. I spent my student loan money on trips to Chicago and New York, bounced back and forth between the U’s fine arts department and MCAD, and generally frittered away my time surfing the already-waning synergy of the late-80s and early-90s art scene.

Probably to conserve length, Madison blurs the distinctions between what was and is the commercial gallery sector versus the huge number of non-profits: a spectrum shift seen over the past twenty years that has real bearing on the future of the Twin Cities art scene. A respected and established framer and exhibition designer in the Northrup King complex recently made his feelings plain: Non-profit galleries don’t exist to make a living for their artists, and they’re ruining the art market. They sponge up grant funds while cultivating “presence,” making stars primarily of their founders, and keeping local prices artificially low. I’ve worked for WARM, for No Name Gallery in its day, and for more contemporary “art centers” as well as having been a for-profit dealer. Commercial galleries still struggle to survive in a pinched urban market, competing with art centers while the cash is increasingly concentrated in the Republican suburbs (a desert of flat-screen TVs, fund raisers and NIMBYism). Local and national foundations have bounced back since September 11th, and the urban non-profit art centers vie hungrily for their attentions, with curatorial efforts increasingly built around “fundable projects.”

At the same time, a top-down ethical hollowness that mirrors the corporate culture of our times results in margin over mission: non-profit organizations that are opposite to the “of, by, and for” alternative art spaces we used to enjoy. The Soap Factory is the lone exception. Artists, bottom line, are still very much on their own in this town. While Madison ends her tour on a hopeful note, I tend to side with Scott Seekins (minus his fondness for fishing): Between the anti-intellectual penury of the suburbs and a city saturated with non-profit art sponges, this town cannot nurture a viable market for most visual artists.