What Has Really Been Lost

How the Loss of Art Schools is Reshaping Bay Area Culture

Via SquareCylinder

Lara Almarcegui, Construction Rubble of Secession’s Main Hall, 2010, Installation View, Secession, Vienna, Austria, photo: Wolfgang Thaler.

I am pleased to share an analysis of the state of the Bay Area art world following the announcement of the closure of California College of the Arts.

“The question is not simply what has been lost, but what follows. Is the Bay Area entering a period of cultural diminishment, or standing at the threshold of a new model? For many, the immediate response has been grief — a sense of rupture. It may also be necessary to ask what new forms of artistic life are already beginning to emerge in the absence of these institutions.

“How an ecosystem adapts after the disappearance of a model that endured for more than a century is not a new question, though today it has been imbued with an unfamiliar urgency. And who is better suited than artists to imagine where we might go from here?”