PLATFORM : Arts and Architecture Have a Role in Rebuilding

The trickle-down 1980s saw art rise to the top with the commodification of taste and style. Paintings vied with pork bellies and soybean futures as potentially lucrative investments. With few exceptions, social vision deteriorated into cocktail party chic and common cause was subverted by a preoccupation with sales agents, gallery shows and big bucks. As prices went through the roof on everything, values, once dear, were co-opted by the super-heated art market.

Where were the artist-prophets to warn us about the dangers developing in South-Central, Koreatown and Pico-Union? What have they said since about the potential for violence in the rest of the country? Some spent the past 24 months fighting Jesse Helms and censorship at the NEA. But should guarding free expression free artists from the need to express the truth of what we were to experience?

How many unemployed workers or homeless people at freeway off-ramps, shopping centers and ATMs needed to be seen for us to know that a greater societal problem existed?

We museums, galleries and university art departments are guilty of watching out for ourselves in a period of tough times and budget cuts and of not looking out to see our communities ready to burn.

It is only through an active arts community engaged in cross-cultural communication, and the building of mutual respect that a sense of cultural pride and ownership will join with an economic sense of ownership to produce a society with a shot at making it.