Town Haul
Artwashing, Gentrification, and Jersey City
On Tuesday, December 11, Jersey City will unveil a new “cultural assets map,” a project designed to “help with connection between artists, organizations and the public” and “identify areas of improvement for physical and financial development.” Developed in conjunction with New Jersey City University, the Jersey City Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Jersey City Arts Council, the map will be unveiled at a “breakfast and press event” at NJCU’s downtown campus. The map will presumably serve as a convenient listing of Jersey City’s cultural hot-spots, be those as they may, and a colorful prop for cultural boosterism. The map’s public relations value obscures its true nature: it is a fraudulent bit of diversion intended to drive real-estate prices up and to present a veneer of “hipness” to a place that is rapidly emptying of any true artistic vigor. It has nothing to do with art, and everything to do with real estate.
The cultural assets map is a classic example of a process known as “artwashing,” a kind of corollary operation to gentrification wherein a rising neighborhood or city is misleadingly branded as being an artistic hub in order to attract moneyed newcomers, force out longtime residents, and drive up rents. Real estate professionals have long known that a patina of perceived artsiness is catnip to a certain class of urban professionals who, unable for reasons of profession or temperament to suss out such matters for themselves, must have an aura of cultural relevance prefabricated for them. The result is a kind of Potemkin village, a sham simulation of an urban bohemia that can only serve as a shallow echo of the diverse, messy, often raw contours of a truly active artistic community.
Why does this matter? What, in the end, is so bad about a cultural asset map? The answer lies in the exercise’s fundamental dishonesty. The cultural assets map is an example of that particular paradox where making a situation seem good actually contributes to making it worse. It says we value the arts here, even as every other civic and fiscal policy imaginable actively says otherwise. It’s ideal propaganda, highly visible, easily reproducible, and relatively inexpensive; a cunning bit of misdirection from an administration whose disdain for any obstacle to rampant gentrification is a matter of public record.
The three things that are most important to true artists are cheap rent, cheap rent, and cheap rent. Nothing else matters — not maps, not city-guided studio tours, not faux-authentic murals, nothing. For Mayor Steve Fulop — the keynote speaker at Friday’s “press event” — to present himself as an ally and advocate of the arts while giving away millions of tax dollars in real-estate abatements for luxury condominiums is nothing short of grotesque. It is a display of hypocrisy and double-dealing that is truly Trumpian in its shamelessness.
As for the Jersey City Arts Council, its endorsement of this mockery can only be considered a failure of principle. I know some of the people on the JCAC; they are good, smart, earnest, well-intentioned people whose love for the arts is unquestionably genuine. They seem unable to perceive or acknowledge, however, that their participation in this travesty gives cover to an administration whose entire program has been destructive of the economic and social diversity that is the true seedbed of a thriving arts community. The honorable thing for the council to do would be to demand substantial rollbacks in the abatements and a legitimate commitment to affordable housing and, failing to achieve that — which they would, of course — to resign in protest. Anything short of this is rank collaborationism.
When the call for a survey to seed the “cultural asset map” went out in June, there was no visible discussion of its implications or even of its necessity. No attempt that I can see was made to ask if there might be other, more tangible ways for the city to show its support for the arts. None, perhaps, was necessary, of course; the prospectus itself crowed that “eventually, the tool can aid in tourism and growth for Jersey City at large.” Whose growth, exactly, remained unsaid.
