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I love to hate art. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t hate the art scene even more. In a city like Seattle with its thriving arts landscape this place should be a safe haven for creative pursuits. It isn’t. Instead Seattle is a place where everyone is doing SOMETHING and NO ONE really cares. Too many artists? Perhaps. Or maybe galleries have created a climate of scarcity around shows through a false sense of competition within the artist community, making artists desperate. Or maybe it’s just plain poor social skills. In our provincial hamlet, I can go to first Thursday for months, walk the same damn streets, take the same bus route to Pioneer Square and see the same faces, but get dissed, cold shouldered, ignored or at best acknowledged with a scoff.
With all fairness there are exceptions to this phenomenon, such as green transplants, from the Midwest or Cali, unaware of the climate of the city. Another exception is Mr. Greg Kucera: a man with a benevolent disposition, a fine eye for quality art and nothing to gain from highway snobbery.
Mostly, though, in Seattle’s arts scene it isn’t who you know but who you’re fucking. It is all about who gave you that designer gonorrhea. Seattle artists need the lava dome of pressure to blow off like steam from Mt. St. Helens. The incestuous “scene” needs to look beyond the myopic sense of itself and realize that the progression of modern art isn’t limited to Seattle, Washington, USA.
When there is the rest of the country and world to be an artist in, what is cool or relevant in art isn’t limited to what lives and dies in small-town Seatown. Plenty of artists have gotten this fact right, left Seattle, and never looked back. One such is Capitol Hill resident and golden boy Jake Sheers from Scissor Sisters, whose passion had been capped for a long time, before bursting forth when the emotional lid got lifted. Once an artist leaves a town where ANY display of emotion is seen as vulgar and uncouth, the sky is the limit! Riddle me this, do you cream your jeans when you get a wink from a prominent glass artist (the macramé of fine art) or a “hello” from a gallery dealer you want to blow? Then ask yourself, are you REALLY an artist?
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