ArtWalk Walks…
…And in other news about changes to events I frequent and blog about (see list at end), the downtown LA ArtWalk, which had turned into a monthly street festival (that had very little to do with art, but so what?) that brought downtown alive by attracting people from all over the city, has been canceled, to the surprise of many. I’m shocked by this but at the same time not entirely surprised as I have seen the seeds of this before. (The photo is of a piece entitled “Faith Machine”, by Robert Reynolds, that I saw in Bert Green’s gallery in 2008. Click on the photo to jump to the post about it, and a video showing its lovely breathing action…)
As much as it has moved to being more of a walking city than it is given credit for by most people, something I talk a lot about here, I have to admit that Los Angeles still does not really know how to deal with too many people on the streets. And by “too many” I mean levels that would be regarded as normal in so many other places. The expectation is that too many people (especially in neighbourhoods that are not in the, er, supposedly more genteel West side of the city) is simply a bad thing that is prone to turn into a “problem”. That is always the first reaction. In any case, it is certainly reasonable that some level extra policing is needed for safety, etc., but this is where things get sticky. The increase in policing that is needed to deal with the extra people puts a strain on resources, and there ensues an argument for who will pay the bill. So crowds are simply regarded as clearly negative, instead of an opportunity to build community, express humanity, and for other things involving positive person-to-person connections that this city needs more of. So the thing seems to have been killed because a model for how to foot the bill for extra policing could not be worked out… There may be more to it than that, but that rough model seems to fit the pattern I’ve seen before**.
My main point here is that by LA standards the ArtWalk had grown to become a large crowd, but it was no larger than a typical Summer’s weekend evening in Times […] Click to continue reading this post
