Hipster Invasion
Downtown Oakland's fledgling art scene is booming — and some artists and residents aren't terribly happy about it.
By David Downs
The invasion of Oakland launches just before sunset the first Friday of every month. There's no command and control structure. No clear mission. It's more like a force of urban nature: Ragtag groups of white twentysomethings on bicycles swarm south, down the East Bay's three major arterials — San Pablo Avenue, Telegraph Avenue, and Broadway — to converge in downtown Oakland.
On a map this convergence looks like a big V, the crotch of which is the invasion's primary target. Auxiliary teams of art fans move in from the west — San Francisco — along with culture hunters from east of the hills. Everyone is seeking some new sensation, or a story to bring home from a neighborhood that gets fewer tourists than some war zones.
The darker the skies become, the more hipster kids coagulate at the beachhead of 23rd Street and Telegraph, flanked by a desolate parking-lot tundra and steel skeletons of half-built condos. At first they number one hundred, then two hundred, then three. The downtown high-rise lights come on and drums begin echoing off brick and concrete canyons. Forbidding walks down dirty sidewalks fronting shuttered businesses become less forbidding as additional regiments roll in. After 23rd Street closes to traffic, the area is secure and the street party begins. Bic lighters pop tops off bottles of Arrogant Bastard ale hidden in brown paper bags. Sometimes a jug band plays for change, other times it's drummers, but every first Friday since January, this downtown invasion — the Oakland Art Murmur — has grown bigger still.
What began with six grungy galleries and stacks of promotional postcards has turned into a cultural critical mass that has exploded beyond 25 galleries, attracted national news coverage and a thousand-plus art fans on Murmur nights, and led to sales of pricey artwork to wealthy patrons including Bay Area celebs like Steve Jobs.
This is success, right? Well that depends upon whom you ask. The downtown art scene's rapid growth already has led to bitchy infighting among its founders, and cries of "white invasion" and "gentrification" from the black residents who have lived in this hood for decades. And with thousands of half-million-dollar condos sprouting in its midst, it's apparent that all the attention could hasten the scruffy scene's demise.
In many ways, it's the classic story of urban renewal: Young artists move into a downtrodden place where they can afford the rents. They proceed to build up a buzz and a social scene, paving the way for hip bars, restaurants, boutiques, and upscale condo dwellers. Ultimately, and ironically, their efforts bring about a neighborhood where young artists — not to mention the original residents — can no longer afford to live. Sometimes the process takes decades, but when combined with the city of Oakland's own efforts to remake downtown into an upscale residential haven, this particular story has proceeded at an unprecedented pace. "We don't stand on the precipice of something like this very often," Ego Park gallery leader Kevin Slagel says. "I think it's going to get appropriated out of our hands."
The inside of Mama Buzz coffee shop and gallery resembles a dorm room, all dirty dishes and bizarre posters falling off the walls. In the adjoining gallery space, photos of corporate-suited goons shake hands above a table seating what could pass for a college study group. A young blonde woman in a brown librarian sweater taps at a Mac laptop, while other casually dressed art kids write in notebooks or doodle on sketchpads. Tonight's topic isn't academic. The six attendees form a chunk of the gallery cabal responsible for the Art Murmur. This is their headquarters, where they review each First Friday operation and plan new sorties.
A college communications professor who teaches about "goal-oriented groups" would give this one a C-minus for efficiency. Its meeting starts late, and reps from most participating Murmur galleries are AWOL. There's no roll call, no agenda, no minutes, little decision-making, and no clear chairperson. Nicole Neditch, second in command at Mama Buzz, works the laptop and tries to keep the group on task while Mama Buzz No. 1, Jen Loy, handles the coffee-shop operation.
At the table, Boontling Gallery co-owner Mike Simpson explains that the whole Murmur campaign began as a way for galleries to help one another. "Some e-mails went around," he says. "We had a few meetings."
At its heart, the Murmur was a $130 buy-in for area galleries that wanted to participate in a publicity campaign. That bought each gallery space on a simple Web site, a mention in an ad that ran in the Express for three months, and a callout on a downtown art scene map reproduced on five thousand postcards. Most important, the initial campaign alerted perhaps a quarter-million Bay Area residents that six galleries — Mama Buzz, Rock Paper Scissors, Boontling, Ego Park, Auto 3321, and 21 Grand — near the Telegraph crotch would hold simultaneous openings of new art on the first Friday of each month.
The idea wasn't original. San Francisco's First Thursdays are a Geary Street institution, and other East Bay galleries have split publicity costs before. What was different was the presence of a nucleus of galleries consistently coordinating new exhibits, all amid a huge municipal campaign to repopulate and revitalize Oakland. Word spread quickly. "It has become phenomenally successful at bringing more people to the neighborhood than I can remember," Loy says.
From the very start, however, Art Murmur's founders were divided on publicity and purpose. "It took three meetings to even settle on a name," Boontling's Simpson says. "Then some people had their own ideas about the Murmur and were angered by the advertising. They thought that it would make things worse."
The Murmur committee's initial anarchy had lessened a bit by its April meeting, whose rough minutes are as follows:
Item A: Should galleries be able to add content to the Murmur Web site?
Darren Johnston of 21 Grand notes that he is afraid someone might write "Shitfuckshitfuck, Fuck the Oakland Art Murmur" on the site. No decision made.
Comments (4)
Showing 1-4 of 4
To Grahamhp,
A spoken word artist of sorts once said the following:
"The reprisals of the weak against the strong do not really come within nature. They do from the moral point of view, but not the physical, since to take these reprisals the weak man must employ forces he has not received from nature. He must adopt a character that he has not been given. He must, in a way, constrain nature. But what does really come from the laws of this wise mother is the harm unto the weak by the strong, since, to bring this process to pass, the strong man makes use only the gift which he has received from nature. He does not, like the weak, take on a character different from his own. He merely utilizes the sole effects of that which nature has endowed him. Therefore, everything resulting from that is natural; his acts of oppression, violence, cruelty, tyranny, injustice: all these diverse expressions of a character engraved in him by the hand of the power which placed him in the world are therefore quite as simple and as pure as the hand which guided him. And when he uses all of his rights to oppress the weak, to plunder the weak, he is therefore doing the most natural thing in the world. If our common mother had desired this equality that the weak strive so hard to establish, if she had really wanted the equitable division of property, why should she have created two classes, one weak, the other strong? Has she not, with this distinction, given sufficient proof that her intention was that it should apply to possessions as well as bodily faculties? Does she not prove that her plan is for everything to be on one side, and nothing on the other? And that precisely in order to arrive at the equilibrium that is the sole basis of all our laws, for in order that this equilibrium may exist in nature, it is not necessary that it be made to establish it. Their equilibrium upsets that nature. What, in our eyes, seems to us to go against it, is exactly that which, in hers, establishes it. And for this reason, it is from this lack of balance, as we call it, that are produced the crimes by which she establishes her order. The strong seize everything; that is the lack of balance, from man's point of view. The weak defend themselves and rob the strong; there you have the crimes which establish the equilibrium necessary to nature Let us therefore not have any scruples about what we can filch from the weak, for it is not we who are committing a crime. It is the act of defense, or vengeance, performed by he which has that character. By robbing the poor, dispossessing the orphan, usurping the widow's inheritance, man is only making use of the rights he has received from nature. The crime that consists in our profit from them, the penniless wretch that nature offers unto our blows is the prey she offers the vulture. If the strong appear to disturb her order by robbing those beneath them, the weak reestablish it by robbing their superiors, and both are serving nature."
I tend to disagree. Apparently, you do not.
The problem isn't the color of your skin. That is no less of a red herring now than it was 500 years ago when European settlers first started displacing the natives of this continent. The problem is that in buying/paying into a situation which will inevitably raise housing costs, rent rates you are actively purchasing their displacement. Whether you would like to remain ignorant of what you are doing or not, the facts still remain that there is a finite supply of space and your youth and earning potential allows you to very easily crowd much older people, either less in demand within workforce (which, mind you, is in no rush to seek new entrants, let alone returning members) as well as elderly retirees living on a fixed income which might raise with the cost of living, but certainly cannot compete with the rate of growth in and subsequent hikes of price in the housing rental market. You may not feel bad about this, but neither will the larger businesses which will inevitably price you out of the neighborhood. Nor will the the thief, drug dealer or mugger who are just trying to survive you. Nor will the rapist or murderer who will target you out of the bad blood created by what you've ignorantly destroyed.
Your lifestyle does not have to contribute to gentrification. to quote Ho Chi Minh:
"Literature and arts belong to the same front, on which you are fighters.
Like other fighters, you, in the artistic field, have your own responsibilities — to serve the Resistance, the Fatherland and the people, first and foremost the workers, peasants and soldiers.
To fulfil your tasks, you must have a firm class stand and a sound ideology; in short you must place the interests of the Resistance, of the Fatherland and of the people above all.
With regard to your creative work, it is necessary that you understand, get in touch with and go deeply into, the people's life. Only by so doing, will you be able to convey the heroism and determination of our soldiers and people as a whole and to contribute to the development and improvement of these qualities. Our Resistance has made great progress; our soldiers and people have made big strides forward, so will you, in the artistic field, by means of criticism and self-criticism."
Until you learn to plant yourselves firmly within the community and to tap into the fears and assumptions of the people who have been living in your neighborhood for decades rather than entering as an enemy occupiers. Your actions in this community will merely be acts of class warfare manifested in the economic violence which you inflict upon the people of this community. As such, those acts of warfare inflicted against you in self defense will only be just. It doesn't have to be this way, the choice is yours.
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I live at 24th and Broadway and sent this article to my girlfriend after reading it myself. The following is her response, and I totally concur...
man, i just read that whole thing, and it made me kinda angry. why all the hating on the hipsters? i feel like we are exactly what they are talking about-especially that one old racist black guy at the end-we are the ones they seem to really hate. we graduated, we moved there because we couldn't afford the big city, we are the tip of the arrow, as bad as the big rich corporation-lovers who are doing the whole gentrification thing. what? we are just trying to survive the way anyone else does. we don't have any hate-i feel like obama would really not like that article either, it's making an issue out of something that shouldn't have to be an issue. the writer obviously doesn't live there, and he acts as if he's writing some truth that everyone else doesn't understand just because he interviewed a couple people who have lived there for a long time or whatever. hey-guess what-shit changes. every neighborhood has changed. every older person misses the way things used to be-but guess what? the population is booming, (what, has it doubled since the 60's or something?) technology is catapulting forward and changing the way everyone interacts and moves, and this arrogant guy (writer) thinks he can go in and name call and thinks he can make all of these assumptions and conclusions about a situation that he knows nothing about. what the fuck? i'd like him to live where we do-i'd like him to meet the people we meet and feel the fear that i have felt when i walk to my car in the middle of the night, wondering if i would be one of the many people who have been victims of crime in the are. how is my simply living and existing somewhere make me the enemy of all of these people in that dumb-fucked writer's mind? people who move somewhere because they can't afford anywhere else-why the fuck are they somehow the enemy? just because they are white? what is there some unwritten law that white people aren't allowed to move to a historically black area simply because other white people might come too? wait, aren't we trying to rid ourselves of the hatred and division caused by racism?
and the whole thing about cops not caring is totally inaccurate. when we have been to art murmur-there are a ton of cops there, and Adam (who is white) was kicked out of the area because he had a beer in a paper bag (as you know, there are a shit-load of people who "live in the area" who drink, smoke weed, or whatever on the street). remember how we even talked about that? there were a ton of cops and we were upset because people there weren't doing anything destructive-there was no one there who was noticably fucked up, no one being violent. but the cops told everyone to disperse and cracked down.
dude-whatever-that article is fucked.
love you :)
hey, anonymous white str8 bourgie boy, can you READ? no one in that article is suggesting a "world with no art" and someone should slap your silly face for that intentionally obtuse hyperbole. art is not some capital A, tortured vision bullshit, but when it's treated like it is, it becomes problematic in an array of ways including those described above. if you really give a shit about contributing to a world in which "people are celebrated, celebrating, making, doing", YOU will get your lazy, reactionary ass to work on recognizing the complexity of privilege and the responsibilities we all have to examine our own and STOP pretending reality is only what we've noticed so far. perhaps once you've done so, your newly-freed-from-your-ass head can be wrapped around the vampiric realities of "the context of the neighborhood is everything". then maybe i'll be interested to hear YOUR answer to "what are you creating?"
City Planners are the ones to be held accountable for the well being of a community. Artists are the absolute life blood of culture; to hatefully blame an art movement for the injustice is very sinister, unfair and unreal. Art is NOT a white thing. It belongs in the hands of all the people, and if you would please breathe in some hope this is exactly where the movement will go...in the hands of all people of all classes of all colors. DO you propose a world with no art? Do you propose everyone consume work sleep? We are creating a movement in which the context of the neighborhood is everything. We are creating a movement in which people are celebrated, celebrating, making, doing. What are you creating?
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