The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Originally from Vietnam, Quang came to the United States when he was five and still has memories of being wrapped in the jacket of a US soldier who helped airlift him out of his home country with his family. He has a short, wiry frame and he’s permanently unabashed:

  I just say everything to everyone and whoever sticks around are my friends.

  The painter leaves for the evening, heading out to meet with a gallerist—Quang made the introduction. He makes a lot of connections. Deft at matching tastes and interests and resources, Quang manages a private multimillion-dollar art collection and runs the family foundation that comes along with it. The family that employs Quang adheres to a model popular in the upper strata of the art world: buy up stacks of work from an artist then decorate this artist with well-publicized (and well branded) awards and fellowships, hoping to drum up more interest—and thusly more value—in the acquired work. The ability to do this on a large scale—creating eight- or nine-figure endowments—buys sway, if not authority, in the marketplace. When Quang walks into a gallery, it is smiles all around. The informed gallerists know the buyers he represents, the stakes he represents, and they work to skillfully handle his interest in the work they are selling.

  The Lower East Side has this sort of exotic exploration feel to it. The most expensive and high profile galleries are parking here. It’s being in a place where there’s a lot of compression and concentration, which is part of the point—you know? Bars love other bars. And in that sense, it’s glomming on—likes, likes, likes. I think galleries really rely on movements of the customers. When you go to a gallery you really don’t go to just one. You do a swoop of them. So you choose based on the neighborhood. And these things are actually broadcasting themselves internationally. In Dubai, the Chelsea district is something large because of its brand name that gives that gallery a certain imprimatur and street cred just for being able to be there because you have to be able to afford it. These big companies that park themselves in these places, it’s like you just say Wall Street, or World Trade Center, or wherever the belly button is and then you sound immediately like a relevant player. It makes you feel not only relevant but actually driving the conversation. So everything follows itself and that’s how you grow something that becomes a trend even if you’re not aware of it.

  As sexy as the history of art in New York is, it’s still business. All the decisions that are made are business decisions. And I think the story of galleries and artists’ studios is the story of commercial leases. At five years, there’s a chance to renew; after ten years, obviously there will not be that chance because it will just be too expensive by that point. So with galleries and studios, neighborhoods run on the lease instead of the creative movement being over.

  You’re victimized by your own success, if you make the neighborhood attractive. The rents have completely gone up on the Lower East Side, there aren’t any more steals. And so what you’re seeing are these little gallery efforts in Bushwick where the spaces are quite industrial and big. The creation folks—the people that make the artworks, and the people who are important to filling galleries—a lot of them are there. It makes them pulsate with a certain kind of energy, which Bushwick has for real. Just look and you see the graffiti changing. You open your window and that buzz, it’s you, you’re a part of it. Something tunes in. It’s very important that the artist be able to feel everything that’s happening around them, whether it’s inside the studio or way beyond in the market, because they’re trying to say something about our best selves, our ideas, our thinking.

  The artist’s space is psychological and sacred, and you have to be really invited to go into an artist’s studio. Creativity happens there but the history is there, too. You always get the detail of looking out the window and this floor was something—a sweatshop, a factory—there’s always something that they know about their space because they have to be tuned in that way.

  Now you have a lot of artists who are “post-studio.” They don’t actually need a studio so they work in closets or they’re working in environments of the city, or coffee shops, or wherever they are—they actually construct work outside the studio. You think about video artists: Where do they cut the film? So it’s not so studio bound anymore.

  When we say an artist loses his studio and it’s tragic, it really is those more traditional forms where the painting, and the paint and the painter cannot live. They need that space—that’s a long-standing tradition. But now when an artist loses his studio space it may just be a closet or an archival space as opposed to a thing that they go to every day to create things. You’re even seeing this in terms of photography where people take the actual photographic process and manipulate it in different ways by putting it outside and letting light do its thing. So you have a process art, which is all about trying to subvert how it’s usually done. And now because the computer and the total internationalization of art influence everything, there are ways in which people can get into the art world outside the studio. It totally broadens boundaries and collapses boundaries in a way that makes it seem almost quaint to be going into a studio to go paint.

  Whether Bushwick will be participating in the notion of New York as an art market, I’m not sure. It’s still confined to the people who make work as opposed to any collectors going over there. When I took my bosses to Bushwick for the first time they were excited by this notion that they were going some place that was unique and special and artist-minded and artists everywhere—and it was true. We really are talking about the people on the ground, people who make work, and people who hang out with each other in the neighborhood. That community can then become very intimate. The challenges of one artist can really bring a bunch of artists to them. Artists help artists. There’s no other person but perhaps another artist who can solve the dilemma of the frame, you know, so they really do need each other. That information and education sharing always is related to the generosity of the spirit, and therefore you have to be around it because you can’t do everything yourself. It’s a place where, yes, your ideas, your values, are reinforced and therefore you are not crazy for making a choice that will probably not work out in your favor while you are here and alive. So they can be rewarded by all the things that go on with interpersonal relationships.

  Quang is echoing mTkalla Keaton’s definition of neighborhood: people. The neighborhood of an artist is not defined by place—certainly not the traditional motif with high ceilings and an oval palette that looks like a colorful Rorschach test. The neighborhood of an artist is defined by the camaraderie of others, “the generosity of spirit” that aids and enlightens and intoxicates.

  One of the most popular reality shows that artists watch on television is Project Runway. It took me a long time to realize why. It’s because they actually make something on that show.

  When you go to the art stores the stuff is so specialized. Some artists will go to hardware stores for chemicals, plus tape, plus glue, plus plastic. Some of these materials are very niche and some are incredibly common. It really is like manufacturing.

  I think artists remain some of the few people in New York who actually make something that isn’t money. They actually don’t make money.

  He laughs.

  They make something else, which is totally useless—it has no point, no purpose. Yet they remain the only ones that are actually making something. That’s sort of amazing when you think about it. They actually work!

  For me, New York City is so much in danger of becoming a place where no one makes anything. You can’t sew buttons on a shirt because there’s a tailor you go to. It’s a service place. The art market isn’t necessarily the manufacturing part. It isn’t being made here as much. And for me the whole cultural tourism and seduction of New York has to do with all the creative sectors generating the kinds of things that people go to see. And if those people don’t live here and make things here then we’re just another shell.

  Now you see Bushwick rates go up. Artists continue to go farther
and farther out. Now they’re going to Gowanus. So how much farther until they leave the city entirely because it’s cost prohibitive? When you look at artists through the generations, from the SoHo artists going forward, none of them have been spared this movement.

  What I don’t understand is what it is that makes people think that we’ll be in an interesting place if everything is only affordable to a certain small group of people. Who is the audience for the city as it continues to grow these towers?

  What is it going to take for people to understand that while you could get higher dollar for rent, there are other factors to consider? Is there any other thing that can make your decision other than the fact that you could get three times the rent for that space? Nobody wants to bother with these things ’cause there’s a line around the block for the addresses. It’s like good citizenry is gone. None of us see ourselves contributing to the way a city gets built. It’s like our lives are elsewhere.

  When you lose an artist to a city like Berlin, they might not come back. Not because they’re famous but because it’s not easy to get back in to New York once you leave. So when people who are artists make a commitment to exiting the city and not participating in it any more, it’s actually a subtraction that doesn’t easily get made up by someone that’s coming in. You’re actually losing some of the history and the fabric of the city. And it’s so quiet that I don’t think anyone really gives a damn. There’s no crisis about art, the art market is so flush and so flooded. The idea of the starving artist is almost moving into a quaint place, like “you should be successful you know.” Collectors want it early and cheap. They poach earlier than ever. First-year MFA students. But the collector is not the most important person in the ecology. The artist is the most important person in the ecology. Without them there is no collector, there is no moment of frontierism, because the people who make the things aren’t being supported and they will stop. And people do stop.

  But at the same time there’s more art than ever—and I’m supportive of everything. I’ve given up dreaming of utopias and commune ideals. Don’t say you’re happy and proud and rewarded just to make the work. Go get the money. I think everyone should go and get your money wherever you possibly can. ’Cause that’s the city. Everything has come to that.

  11.

  Alan Fishman knows how to go get the money. For two-and-a-half weeks in 2008, he served as Washington Mutual Bank’s final CEO. He received either side of $17 million when the government seized the bank, which was eventually foisted onto JPMorgan Chase. Assuming a forty-hour workweek, this is an hourly pay rate of $163,461.54. But let’s assume Alan worked extra hard, say sixty hours a week—actually let’s just say he worked around the clock, he didn’t doze off once during those seventeen nights in September, so consumed was he by the doomed challenge in front of him. In that scenario, his hourly pay rate drops all the way down to $41,666.67.

  We are sitting in Alan’s home office at his family’s upstate compound in Columbia County, two hours north of the city. Outside the windows that encase the room, I see a pond in one direction and a wooded road in the other. For weeks I have been trying to get Alan to meet with me but my requests have been beaten back by the relentless schedule he keeps at sixty-six. So I have chased him all the way up to the town of Ghent, twenty minutes from the town of Hudson where carriage houses have been revived and repainted by gallerists in whose hands artfully distressed walls frame sold-out shows. This county is a series of undulating fields—some cultivated, some grazed, some meadows of tall grass—interrupted here and there by towns and villages that, to varying degrees, swell in population on the weekends with the influx of part-time residents from New York City. Modern, multimillion-dollar estates, sometimes built using passive construction to limit the home’s ecological footprint, share property lines with mobile homes partially covered by blue tarps that supplement their ailing roofs. Three miles down the road from Alan’s house is a 150-acre modern sculpture park.

  Many New Yorkers, this reporter included, live in the city with escape on the mind. A transient spirit prevails—many of us have, after all, escaped to New York, much to Raul’s chagrin—and the city can be unduly unkind for several hours or days or weeks or months at a time. For those like Alan who own a second home in the Hudson Valley or the Berkshires or the Hamptons, the fantasy of escape is replaced by the routine of escape.

  Alan bought this property in the 1960s and has added to it at various points over several decades. In the kitchen on the other side of the compound, his wife and kids and grandkids are making soup. My time with him is limited and this fact stays central to our interaction—he alludes to the ticking clock with his posture (shifting) and fingers (tapping) and knees (shaking) and his hands, which grab at any desk clutter within reach of his swiveling chair. Yet from his steady eye contact, it is clear that his attention remains focused.

  Alan has dark, bushy eyebrows that do not match his silver helmet of perfectly parted hair. The eyebrows take their own path, jetting straight out, as if a symbol of the electricity that runs through the man. In conversation he sometimes raises his voice while accelerating what he is saying, as though we’re in the midst of an argument, but he’s the only one who speaks as I sit listening.

  I was born in Crown Heights, obviously dominated by Ebbets Field and the Dodgers. They used to let us in, you know, as the games were going on. My bedroom overlooked the third base side so during the night games I could see the lights from our house. My parents were both born in Brooklyn. My grandparents were refugees from Russia and Hungary, so it was classic: my grandfather had a shop in Williamsburg that made vests for high-end stores, Brooks Brothers and places like that. Fortunately I had a good education as a graduate student in economics at Columbia and I started in banking in 1969. I’ve been in finance and banking ever since.

  Post-war, the city itself was very static. I think people were still very scared about lending money in New York City, in many neighborhoods. They were very uneasy. You still had an out of control landlord-tenant situation—you know, the owners basically didn’t trust the tenants and the tenants didn’t trust the owners. The city was a very static place. There was no mobility. That began to change as crime went down. You didn’t really feel that change until ’98 or something, during the latter part of the Giuliani years it became apparent. I think the drop in crime enabled people to move into neighborhoods. Then the mortgage business began to respond to that.

  But 9/11 hit and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen, so a lot of stuff started to change at that point. The city needed a backup to Manhattan—separate power grid, separate this, separate that. And so, Downtown Brooklyn was the most ready because it was semi-baked before. And so the city decided that it had to make an investment in Downtown Brooklyn, and it needed some private sector guys to help oversee that. And just through the vapors of being a banker, I sort of knew some of the Bloomberg people and I had met the mayor once or twice: A, as a candidate, and B, just in business because I ran a trading operation. He was looking around for some people that could help him in the boroughs. And when you looked around Brooklyn there was only one private big bank left—the one I was running—and there was a public utility, the CEO was a great friend of mine. So we were two of the power structures that existed in Brooklyn.

  You know, the city had underinvested in capital improvements for a very long time coming out of the financial crisis of the ’70s, and Bloomberg raised so much money. Under his stewardship, the city’s credit has become so stable and so shockingly strong that he was able to raise all this money and invest it so wisely. Among the unsung heroes in the city, I think, are the capital budget people. You know, nobody hears their names, nobody ever knows who the hell they are. They sit in the bowels of the budget department and oversee capital allocation. They’re fabulous public servants, smart guys—and tough guys—and they have real judgment. And so working with Bloomberg and his deputies, these guys supercharged the impact of the crime reduction, th
ey supercharged it with this giant investment system that they’ve put in place. What they did at the Navy Yard is pure genius.

  The navy yard Alan refers to is a 1.7-mile-long stretch of Brooklyn shoreline just across the East River from Manhattan. A military site since 1806, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a place where generations of New Yorkers made things—warships, to be exact. During World War II, seven hundred thousand workers were employed at the site. The navy decommissioned the facilities in 1966, and until the 1990s you could walk along the chain-link fence that encased the complex and see a wasteland of overgrown weeds subsuming cracked asphalt and giant, empty buildings hovering against the sky.

  From 1966 onward it was essentially useless. I mean it barely survived and was really poorly managed, poorly governed, and poorly supported. You know, towards the end of the Giuliani administration they made this cockamamie deal with Doug and David Steiner to build movie studios. I’m not sure it was a real deal. You know, these things are always sort of head fakes on both sides, and nobody knows what the hell’s gonna happen. So when Bloomberg asked me to go and become chairman of the Navy Yard, we had a lot to do. We had to find a CEO, and the board had to be replaced—not completely but basically from top to bottom because the board was really a politically active board that didn’t know much about business. So we cleaned house and I sat down with the Steiners and took the measure of them and they of us and we made a deal. A real deal to actually do something. I think both sides got together and made a theory a reality.

  The site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now a sprawl of various businesses anchored by Steiner Studios, one of the largest movie production facilities outside of Los Angeles. New York is a place that insists on a grand scale for all endeavors. This was the greatest appeal of Robert Moses’s master plans: their seductive scale—the Verrazano Bridge was the longest suspension bridge when it was built in 1964, the secretariat on Forty-Second Street at the East River was built to house all 44,000 civil servants from 170 countries who work at the United Nations, and completion of the Triborough Bridge alone required 31,000,000 hours of work in 134 cities in 20 states. New York’s economic tentacles have always had a near limitless reach—the city has always been a prominent force in local economies across the county.