Bust or Boom?

It's Up to Us to Decide

by Beth E. Wilson, May 27, 2008

If you think the question “What is art?” can only produce an arbitrary response these days, just think for a minute about “What is real estate?” Both art and real estate are cultural constructs, but for my money, the whole real estate thing is much more artificial, by a long shot. That it lends itself (pardon the pun) to greater and greater levels of speculative abstraction—and disastrously so, witness the whole subprime mortgage meltdown—reveals something telling about who and what we are now. It seems there’s not much “real” about “real estate” after all.

It’s looking more and more like the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. Our economy, long propped up by (and addicted to) the fiction of endless expansion, is now running aground on the very real limitations of energy and food supplies, and the capacity of natural systems to recuperate the damage that we inflict upon the planet. While it’s important for us to figure out meaningful, ecologically sustainable political and economic strategies to address the critical challenges facing us, an important aspect of what we need to do now involves what George Bush the First once called “the vision thing.” And there are artists involved in at least three different exhibitions going on this month who are working on just that.

Interestingly, the specter of real estate hovers close by each of the shows. Chris Gonyea asks the question pointedly at The Livingroom with “FOR SALE: Kingston, Past, Present, and Future?” Assembling work that ranges from historically significant drawings and paintings by Woodstock artists Austin Mecklem, Charles Rosen, and Louis Wolchonok to photographs, paintings, and prints by contemporary artists, including Nancy Donskoj, Lynn Woods, and Gonyea himself, the show addresses the issue head-on, ironically labeling each work with contrasting “assessed” and “true market” values. Gonyea’s intention is to create a space for dialogue about where Kingston is, politically, artistically, and economically—a goal at least partially achieved when the show opened last month with a special reception for Tom Hoffay, the recently-named alderman for Kingston’s Second Ward, bringing together uptown businesses and residents to discuss common concerns.

The ultimate doctrine of American real estate, manifest destiny, figures in the very title of “LAND! From the Post on the Prairie,” organized by painter Sean Sullivan with support from Rosendale’s small but always innovative no_space gallery. Set up in two adjacent storefronts on Route 209 in Kerhonkson, Sullivan’s starting point for the show was Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis,” first presented in a lecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The enormous fair was organized to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, and what was then widely understood as the continuous march of progress made by the European settlers in the intervening years. Turner took the occasion to mark the symbolic closing of the American frontier—the massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1891 representing something like the final vanquishing of the country’s indigenous people—and noted that the frontier experience played a key role in defining the “American” character. The continuous confrontation between European culture and the wilderness of the frontier had produced a uniquely American set of values, he held, and as successive generations had moved further and further across the continent, literally and figuratively away from their European source, they had grown more violent, more individualistic, more distrustful of authority, less artistic, less scientific, and more dependent on ad hoc organizations they formed themselves. In broad terms, the further west, the more American the community.