Word: uptown
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...Where can I work in Manhattan?" Giant scale is still built into American art, and that entails large work space. Traditionally, artists seek out a district where space is cheap and plentiful, like the Greenwich Village brownstones four decades ago. Then a price spiral begins with the arrival of uptown people seeking a chic downtown pad. Rent up, artists out; the drift begins again. New Yorkers, being neurotically fashion-addicted, not only use artists as their Seeing-Eye dogs but promptly usurp their kennels...
...typical habit of SoHo slumlords, which persists today, was to offer no lease, wait for the artist to spend a few thousand dollars renovating the loft, and then arbitrarily double the rent. The pattern of exploitation worked because artists had nowhere else to go. There was no space uptown. Greenwich Village was already turning into the Skag Alley it now is, a tureen of thieving junkies and grimy plastic bars among the too-expensive brownstones. The East Village, with its tiny roach-filled apartments and manic adolescents shooting speed in the air shaft, was a dismal alternative. As for Brooklyn...
...world. Artists, fed up with seeing their work presented, if at all, as a luxury item at 50% commission on Madison Avenue, were talking of short-circuiting the dealer system entirely and selling work out of their own lofts. Meanwhile, the prodigious overhead of running an uptown exhibition space made it economically difficult for dealers to show new or unfamiliar art in the fading years of the '60s boom. Opening a branch in SoHo became a necessary gamble. Paula Cooper, the first gallery owner to try it, was watched and eventually followed by Establishment figures like Leo Castelli, Richard...
Baskin-Robbins concocts hundreds of new flavors a year at its gleaming research laboratory in beautiful uptown Burbank, Calif. But only eight or nine a year ever make it to the market. The rest are shot down by the company's discriminating marketing specialists or its finger-in-the-wind president, Irvine Robbins. "We don't sell ice cream," he philosophizes. "We sell...
...dashiki to convince his fellow blacks that he had soul. He was always an individual, difficult to classify. Young's special strength, notes a black journalist, was that "he was urbane enough to talk with the fat cats downtown and hip enough to talk with the tough cats uptown and he never seemed out of place doing either." Indeed, even some of the most bitter black spokesmen came to warmly appreciate Young. When informed of his death, Poet and Playwright Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) wept. "There is a loss here that a lot of black people aren...