I understand people's sadness around the emptying of the Washington Shoe Building in Pioneer Square: With its passing goes any suggestion of a physical link between the commercial galleries, non-commercial galleries, and working artists. Very few cheap studios remain in the neighborhood, mostly concentrated on Alaskan Way and the southern terminus of Western Avenue. Gone, also, is the kind of easy-access, low-key -- if often low-quality -- art provided within the Shoe Building's studios and galleries, which attracted a large part of the neighborhood's traffic on First Thursday, and made visual art accessible and attractive to a younger, hipper set than would otherwise prowl the area's galleries.
But beginning with its cover text -- "Artists' Exodus: Will the last artist to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" -- Michaelangelo Matos' March 30 Seattle Weekly cover story on the building makes claims that it fails to justify in any way. The subtitle calls the Shoe "Pioneer Square's last remaining independent artists' building." I have no idea what that means, exactly, but I assume the working artists at 619 Western would quibble with that statement. As far as the general sense of doom overshadowing the evictees, who fear they'll never find another space in Seattle, they should be told that cheap buildings in the International District and Ballard have vacant studios at this very moment. A bunch of happy 20-year-olds won't go traipsing through their studios once a month, but maybe the Shoe artists will be able to get more work done in a quieter environment -- the upstairs studios at the Shoe, when open, often evinced little sign of industry, except in terms of home decorating.
Most important, in my view, is the fact that the three best alternative gallery spaces in the Shoe -- Oculus, FotoCircle, and Zeitgeist, have already found new homes without being forced to leave Pioneer Square -- in fact, without having to move more than a couple of blocks away. In my book, that slightly undercuts the claims of an art apocalypse retailed by Matos' article and by Cynthia Rose in The Seattle Times.
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Speaking of Ms. Rose, the emerging art scene's main advocate in the local press has moved on from the Times to a dot-com. Habit.com, a start-up web-magazine/video/e-commerce site, has been prowling amid Seattle's culturati, snapping up On the Boards' Philip Endicott, rave promoters Dave Kushmerick and Greg Richards, Consolidated Works' Meg Shiffler, Sweet Mother Records' DJ Nasir, and the Times' Rose in a matter of months.
Habit's business plan involves links between video footage (concerts, interviews, music videos), magazine-type articles, and buying opportunities. It will no doubt hemorrhage money for a long while -- luckily, it'll be hemorrhaging it straight into the pockets of artsy people I like.
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Since I was needling ACT Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein last week for taking an almost $50,000 grant to produce a Neil Freaking Simon play, I should laud him this week for taking another healthy-sized grant (from the Theater Communications Group) to bring David Shiner in for a long-term residency. Shiner, the best mean neo-vaudevillian clown in the theater, has been here in the past with brilliant nice-guy clown Bill Irwin, and is just plain funny as shit. Look forward to seeing whatever he does here.
Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com.
