SEIZE THE INEVITABLE

Policy-makers want to influence the Portland art scene. Is the art scene ready to influence policy?

by Tiffany Lee Brown

Portland has long been on the shortlist of Hipster Cities in the U.S. It's where you move if you want a simmering indie music scene but can't abide Austin's cockroaches. It's the default West Coast destination if you can't afford San Francisco and find Seattle lackluster. It's where you go to create stuff for the hell of it, as opposed to New York City, which is where you go to be an ambitious businessperson in the industry of "creativity."

Thousands of modern Bohemians, for lack of a better word, have known this for years. Whether you call it Boho, underground, or do-it-yourself, we have our own little world of café art shows, self-published zines and basement music scenes. We're basically invisible to the government, rich people, upscale galleries and popular media, except when one of us "makes it." Otherwise, we're left happily alone.

Until now. Thanks to the writings of urban growth experts such as Richard Florida and Bruce Adams, government officials are peeking beneath our cloak of invisibility to find out what makes us tick and how to keep us in Portland. Writers at local publications, along with policy-shapers at the Portland Development Commission, Portland State University and the Mayor's office, zealously study the issue. It seems that the Big Guys have finally found a use for us: the Boho creative community makes good bait.

The big fish is the "young creative class", a demographic group that can be defined to include anyone aged 18-34 who makes their money creating new ideas, technology or content. Because cities and their economic health are increasingly centered on ideas and consumption rather than the old-fashioned concept of industrial production, those that lure and retain creatives will ostensibly become economically and culturally vital, while other towns languish in boring post-industrial squalor. The creatives will invent self-cleaning toothbrushes, make critically acclaimed films, program death-defying software, start dozens of healthy businesses, and cure cancer. No wonder Portland politicians want their share of the goods.

The broad definition of the creative class includes marginally employed artists and Boho creatives, but don't let this fool you. In all likelihood, the City is desperate to attract only a segment of the creative class: the wealth-creating members whom one might call, in an unkind mood, the Creative Yuppies. To keep the Cruppies happy, City officials and policy-shapers appear ready to bolster Portland's burgeoning arts scene and creativity-based economic sector. Independent-minded Bohos, established art institutions and underground collectives alike should take measures now to influence the inevitable evolution of our city.

TRICKLING UP

Creative communities don't need urban growth analysts to explain what I call the Trickle-Up Theory. The existence of small, fringe, super-weird creatives and their output (from art to music to crafts to events to excellent parties) attracts the next layer up of DIY creatives and Boho loft-dwellers whose work is more slick, critically acknowledged and/or well-promoted. They in turn draw the economically feasible movers and shakers that the City wants to attract. Florida conducted intensive studies and found creative class people to be finicky, but drawn to diversity and tolerance. They wanted communities in which they could define themselves and create their own identities. Cruppies are looking for more than organic food and mountain-biking trails, and many don't care about the opera or ballet.

According to my anecdotal evidence, collected by living among Bohos and Cruppies in various cities for the last fifteen years, creatives of all stripes want originality and genuine expression around them. They want a zinemaking resource center, a café with experimental music or an independent film collective. They want a smorgasbord of interesting performances, galleries, boutiques and record labels. Such things come to Portland courtesy of various Bohos.

But Bohos shouldn't look at Cruppies as mere hangers-on. "Trickle-Up" is the basic model, but the relationship between Bohos and Cruppies is actually complex and symbiotic. For one thing, many of us move between the different layers. An artist might become a hard-earning Cruppie for a while, motivated by starting a family. Owners of a successful DIY-level gallery might close shop to resume their personal artistic pursuits. People often occupy both roles at once, moonlighting as artists and working as well-paid creative professionals.

Furthermore, Cruppies spend money on everything from "risky" new artwork to gourmet vegetarian food. As the excitement of underground activity and the aura of authenticity trickle up, money trickles down, occasionally feeding those who create art, music and performance, along with gallery owners and show promoters. Local writer Michael McGregor explores the situation in the Winter issue of Metroscape, a publication of PSU's Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies. He writes, "To sustain a vital arts community - one diverse and prosperous enough to attract international attention while both fostering and holding onto local talent - a city needs a large and active art-consuming public, one with the inclination and the money to support a variety of artists and arts organizations." This is where the Cruppies come in, breezing into art galleries and venues after their 12-hour workdays at agencies and software companies, wads of cash dripping from their pockets into the waiting hands of installation artists and performance poets.

Despite the symbiosis that exists between Boho artists and their creative class benefactors, a delicate balance must be maintained between the two groups' interests or the whole soufflé collapses. Portland presently has a wealth of Boho creators and a dearth of substantial patronage. That doesn't stop us from creating art and producing shows, but some of us yearn for the financial support that would allow us to do more and do it better. If we court the Cruppies too recklessly, however, we could end up being pushed out of our own city by high rents.

Artists are typically part of a second wave of gentrification (after punks). As wealthier households follow their lead, rents go up and Bohos lose their foothold. They can't afford to stay underemployed but highly creative, so most either scramble for their own yuppie jobs and start putting in 60-hour work weeks, or they split town and establish the next creative mecca in a friendlier habitat. Increasing competition and high rents also make it difficult for artists to find venues for the same galleries, designer collective shops, music shows and multimedia events that are part of a town's appeal to the creative class. The end result is a dull city full of the vaunted, wealth-generating creative class, many of whom will migrate to the next hipster spot at the drop of a hat. San Francisco followed this arc in the 1990s. Now many of those Cruppies are broke, and a lot of them are reading this, having moved to Portland to chase the creative dream.

REMEMBER THE ARTISTS

Clearly, it would not be in the City's best interests to promote the creative class at the expense of the actual artists. To keep the whole cultural ecosystem in balance, the City should offer artists resources such as micro-loans, grants and rent stabilization, which could be done with existing City resources and a minimal financial investment. Larger policy decisions should keep the Boho artists in mind. Districts such as the Central Eastside could be specially zoned to respond to the inevitable developers' interest in gentrification while keeping artists from being priced out. The City could actively promote an effort to match up artists and collectives with currently unoccupied real estate. A special designation could be set up for local creative businesses, offering them a Fast Track through all permit processes, not only helping artists and craftspeople who want to start their own businesses and collectives, but ensuring that there are plenty of small galleries, cafés, shops and performance venues to show the Bohos' work. In general, the City could mount a campaign to actively promote its own citizens and their independently owned, nonfranchise micro-businesses, instead of hoping that an outside corporation will alight on our blighted economy like some Deus ex machina and save us all.

Once these programs are in place, outreach will be needed. In my own conversations with Mayor Katz and others at the City level, I've found that policy-makers are so steeped in local politics and policies that they don't realize how little the average person knows, myself included. Most of my friends who would qualify for this goofy "Boho" tag don't read The Oregonian or know how to navigate intricate red tape. My friend George made a great, simple suggestion: a hotline, with ads placed in universally accessible places like Tri-Met buses and billboards. On a slightly more ambitious level, an office or bookmobile-style resource center could educate artists about loans, grants and other programs. Special attention could be paid to accessibility and diversity, so that our city doesn't solely promote its white, educated, Internet-using, English-speaking, nondisabled artists. (Incidentally, Portland's whiteness and appearance of segregation is, according to the experts, a big turnoff to the creative class.)

DO IT YOURSELF TOGETHER<

As Portland confronts the problems and opportunities of Creative Trickle-Up, many artists look the other way. Some define themselves by their Otherness and intentionally alienate themselves from other creative groups, the aboveground community and anything that stinks of government. Others, having established themselves on the independent scene, want the city to stay exactly as it is. But even if the City hadn't suddenly noticed its underground Boho population, change would be inevitable. Portland would still be full of new voices, new artists, new media and new collectives, who create change and reroute the flows of cultural and monetary capital simply by working to realize their artistic and cultural visions. They're doing it now. Change is already here.

What can the arts community do about it? We can start by facing reality and acknowledging that we're part of this city and its political environment. Then we can take advantage of this slender window in time, this strange moment in which policy-makers and influencers actually want to hear from us and make efforts to keep us here. What can the City do to help you? Write letters to the editors of local papers. Call the Mayor's office. Flood the PDC with your opinions. Debate the issues with artists and creatives, whether at events or in online forums (such as the PDX-Salon and DIY Artists mailing lists).

Working together may be the only way to preserve what we love about Portland while influencing its inevitable evolution. That may fly in the face of many do-it-yourself principles, but sharing resources is especially important for those of us involved in mounting large events and complicated shows. If seven splintered arts groups got together and presented a kick-ass plan for sharing some big warehouse in the Central Eastside or starting a creatively based e-commerce collective, the City would pay attention. They might even pony up some loans or help obtain space.

But we have to bury our assorted competitive axes and get off our lazy butts right now. Politicians are like magpies, and the City will have moved on to something shinier in six months. We have an astonishing, beautiful mix of creative people in Portland at the moment, representing all manner of genre, aesthetic, musical taste, political bent, intellectual tendency and social group. Sometimes this results in pointless snobbery, backstabbing and fragmentation between groups. It's time to crawl out of our comfy little cliques and break our usual patterns of artistic creation, enjoyment and critique. Even if we fail to influence City policy and Portland's inevitable evolution, we'll still reap the rewards of cultural cross-pollination, artistic open-mindedness and a more fluid, robust creative community.

Tiffany Lee Brown is the editor of 2GQ.org and the former editor of Anodyne magazine and Signum Press. She contributes to Bookforum, Bust, Willamette Week and other magazines, as well as writing short fiction for various books and journals. She lives in Portland, where she plays with the band Brainwarmer.