What if Detroit Treated its Art Data as Effectively as the City Treats Real Estate Data?
Can We Follow the Example of Art Prize in Grand Rapids and Heat Up our Real Estate Market?
Tuesday, January 10th, 2023 at 8:20 PM
Yorkshire Woods
Detroit Michigan
Today, I began making a list of art destinations, mostly in the City of Detroit. I hoped to limit my list to spaces where artist exhibited work for sale. The space needed a commitment to curating shows that changed at least four times of year. I found myself opening that definition to reflect my knowledge of a venue. For example, I knew that the New Dodge Lounge in Hamtramck had begun to exhibit shows for emerging artists.
At first blush, my motivation came from a simple idea. I love to visit art shows on the occasion when they open to the public. I enjoy meeting the artists. I delight in listening to the curator and artists share from the thoughts and feelings about the shows. It’s also fun to enjoy a few adult beverages and maybe snack on some cheese and crackers while talking with people of similar bent.
By that standard, the opening on Saturday at Hatch Art made for a total success. I had good conversations with Julian Wong and Jon DeBoer. I slso rapped at length with Eric Mesko, who created an installation in the hoosegow of Hatch Gallery, a jail cell left over from the days when the building housed the Hamtramck Police Department. Rather than drink alone in a shotgun shack of a bar every night, I would like to have more of the excitement of an art opening.
So far, I’ve come up with over one hundred active venues, more or less, in the Detroit Metropolitan area. A few of these I discovered from hawking Facebook events. More than a few I found reviewing the great documentation at Art Detroit Now. I wonder what happened to Art Detroit Now, which posted last in Fall 2022. I don’t believe Art Detroit Now established a revenue model for its high quality newsletter. And email newsletters on almost any topic that build an active readership become hot properties, snapped up for real money.
We’ve had a number of efforts to create the unified calendar of Detroit art events, Art Detroit Now one of the latest. For example, Robert Maniscalco published a periodic email of art events, promoting his gallery on Mack Avenue and supporting his work as a Wayne County Arts Commissioner. The Metro Times calendar helps people pick out openings, but it’s hardly curated. A few articles help the art citizens navigate the seasons. Nick Sousanis and his brother published a tight, relevant arts calendar called The Detroiter. But then Nick Sousanis earned his doctorate and began teaching college in Canada and San Francisco.
Grand Rapids serves as a good example of what can happen when art in public places becomes activated through information technology. Art Prize began in 20009. From the start, Art Prize began to set records. In the first year, enough people turned out in the four square mile district that restaurants ran out of food, bars ran out of beer and wine and garbage collection had to be accelerated. To use rough numbers, Grand Rapids found donors to invest not much more a million dollars into Art Prize in the early year. The results speak for themselves. Construction has progressed strongly in downtown Grand Rapids. Real Estate inventories plummeted as prices rose strongly. To learn more, we’ll have to look at the economists who studied the phenomenal shoulder season festival.
As I seek my list of art openings, I hope to collaborate with programmers and data engineers to see what can happen with Detroit’s art data. At very least, we’ll gather positive data that will look good in brochures.
