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 Square or Greenwich Village in New York, or a regular Saturday night in Soho or Covent Garden in London. Can we, supposedly one of the major cities of the 21st Century, and the so-called entertainment capital of the world, really not find the resources to deal with that once a month? Really?

I’m sad about this, since it was such a breath of fresh air to see downtown in the evening full of people once a month. Yes, there were clearly issues surrounding the huge amounts of loud bands or sound systems spilling out onto the streets, and the food trucks maybe sucking more business away from the restaurants than some would like, but to just cancel the thing outright seems to be a bit of an over-reaction. (There is discussion of having it return in 2011, but only as a quarterly event. See more on all this at LA Weekly, and LA Observed.)

Let’s hope those who experienced that downtown is a great place to visit will simply keep going down there, enjoying the spaces, the food, the streets, and yes, maybe even the art.

-cvj

**I recall the dreadful handling of the day of the Michael Jackson Memorial, for example, where there was a mass media offensive with announcements from the police and so forth to discourage people from gathering to celebrate the man, saying to stay home and watch it on TV. People listened, and stayed away – while every other major city on the planet celebrated and memorialized the man with wonderful heart-warming spontaneous crows activities – and so the end of the day saw those same media outlets expressing shock and surprise that hardly anybody turned out to gather on the streets. That was singularly annoying, and sad.

*Thanks Ilaria!