New York real estate vs. American art, or: A Space of Our Own

Is it really a space problem?

Last week, an article from the latest October magazine issue titled New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art and written by the artist Josh Kline bubbled up into group chats, conversations with art friends, and Kaitlin Phillips’ newsletter. The Maxwell Graham gallery made the 19-page PDF available on their website (that’s what I linked you to above) to download — or to print and to take with you to read while gallery hopping this past weekend, as I did, which made for a very embodied experience of the essay.

The argument Kline makes about how New York has become too expensive for artists is, of course, not revelatory to anyone who pays rent, but as someone on the edges of that particular world that Kline swims in, I appreciated how he broke down the economics in granular detail. I think we writers forget that we have a fairly portable, square-foot-agnostic profession in that we mostly just need a corner and a laptop to make our “stuff”; I write off roughly 20 square feet of my apartment as “work space” every year…