An artist’s rant. Community – Networking

During the pandemic I had the misfortune of meeting other “community” artists who tried to steamroll their way into creating public artwork in my historically underserved town. At that time I think I had been maintaining the public artwork in my neighborhood for 11 years (with no funds and artists from my neighborhood).  Anyway these other guys were being goaded by a skeezy councilman (with lots of funds) on his last term who is also seen as a sellout and wanted to appear like he is doing something for the community on his way out. I remember they started talking down to me as if I was some small potato and I asked them if they lived in my town which they didn’t. One of them even tried to do a reverse victim attack herself by saying that she and her friends had a right to create in my town (which none of them live in btw) because they were the same ethnicity as them. I guess she wanted to make it about race, unfortunately for them this was on the phone and I am the ethnicity this woman tried to use as a victim thing which was super embarrassing… Anyway my community had my back and some community leaders made some calls and they backed off. The councilman pretended he knew nothing about this (so throwing his underlings under the bus which is on brand) and I realized community can just be a group of gentrified doofuses with good marketing and money.

 

I am happy to be in a real art community outside of networking weirdos.  Sorry about my rant I just got triggered by an instagram post talking about how the word community is thrown around to hide the actual intent which typically is networking and I remembered my own gross experience.  I don’t think networking or business is bad, but at least be upfront about it maybe.