The Art World Needs to Rally Behind the #CancelRent Movement to Save Itself—and Everyone Else, Too

At the end of last month, just a little less than a week after
New York’s economy was put on “pause” to combat the cresting
coronavirus crisis, the artist group known as the Illuminator
staged a guerrilla action in Manhattan, projecting this slogan onto
a skyscraper: “Cancel the Rent.”

That demand is not some dreamy wish-list item right now. It’s a
baseline survival
necessity. Without serious relief for those thrown out of work
and businesses forcibly shuttered, the cascade effects are going to
turbocharge the chaos that is already unfolding.

How the people whose livelihoods have been upended are going to
make it through this period is not narrowly an “art issue.” Every
sector of the economy is affected.

But it is an art issue, since hundreds of small art spaces that
already operated on wisp-thin margins are now teetering on the
brink. That’s why, for instance, the New Art Dealers Alliance
(NADA) got on board immediately with senator Michael Gianaris’s
Senate Bill S8125A, which would cancel commercial and residential
rent for 90 days for anyone impacted by the coronavirus crisis.

Even 90 days is unlikely to be sufficient, but it is a start.
Saying that the idea of rent relief is popular right now would be
an understatement. “Our own senate website almost crashed yesterday
because so many people were logging on to support this bill,”
Gianaris told New York last
week. “It was the most interactions we’ve ever had on our
website for a piece of legislation.”

I have in my inbox a chaotic welter of online petitions
(business is good, at least, over at Change.org!), all pleading for
relief measures of different kinds during this extraordinary
shutdown period, commanding a combined hundreds of thousands of
signatures. At least two of these, I note, were started by art
workers of various kinds, showing how keenly the arts community’s
precarious labor force feels the pain. Jodi and Lauren Savitz, whose #RentFreezeNYC petition
has close to 18,000 signatures, are documentary filmmakers.
Marti Cummings, whose “Suspend Rent & Mortgage
in New York During COVID-19” petition has close to 150,000, is
a Hell’s Kitchen
politico and drag performer.

“This crisis is going to bankrupt businesses and people,
specifically low-income people who struggle to pay rent as it is in
an increasingly high-rent city,” Cummings told Gothamist. “This
is going to take a long time to recover from, and that’s why we
need to put these policies in place now.” With nightlife venues
shuttered, Cummings is resorting to doing drag shows
via Facebook Live.

The coronavirus shutdown has plunged the “experience economy”
into a cryogenic deep freeze. It’s possible that this freeze can
merely be a period of brutal hibernation—but only if we keep
financial life-support systems on. And that means finding a way to
#CancelRent.

Everyone is swooning over Andrew Cuomo’s bared biceps right now,
but he was a knave before and he’s a
knave now, in my book
(gotta love the generational warfare of Vogue
vs. Teen Vogue on
that score). Listen to the nurses who have fought the Cuomo
Cutbacks for years and now have to risk their
lives facing the medical equivalent of a tidal wave while
manning a lifeboat that the Governor has personally poked holes
in—then tell me he’s your pandemic hero.

Last week, the state budget was
passed without Gianaris’s
90-day lifeline on rent. Giararis is now pleading for Cuomo to act
by executive order, but the governor counters that his temporary
moratorium on evictions means that he has already done
enough—even though it still forces laid-off workers and idled
small business owners to spend money on rent over essentials at a
time when, because of Cuomo’s own (needed) “pause” of the economy,
they literally cannot make money.

What are they supposed to pay the rent with? What’s the
plan here?

Cuomo himself stoked the idea that exceptional emergency action
was both possible and necessary when he worked with banks to
stop mortgage payments
for 90-days for affected property owners, calling it “a stress
reliever for many families.” Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez was perfectly accurate when
she weighed in on the issue, saying that relieving homeowners and
leaving stricken renters out to dry is a “class and race” issue,
because owners tend to be wealthier than renters.

The real estate industry is Cuomo’s biggest donor.
As the urban geographer Tom Angotti has pointed out, real
estate is to New York as oil is to Houston. So I am not
surprised that the real estate industry would fight hard to mute any
demands for a rent jubilee—but the result could well be mass
homelessness, blight, and a downward spiral of declining commercial
activity that will make recovery even more anguishing. See how well
their property values do then.

Wartime analogies are in vogue just now. We
are told we need a mobilization of society on the level of World
War II proportions to get through this. War conditions are the only
image our military-obsessed country knows that suggest a sense of
collective purpose that justifies sacrifice; normally,
hyper-individualistic hedonism and “compensatory
consumption” are sold to us as our birthright and sole purpose
in life.

Most New Yorkers have risen to the challenge, treating this
crisis with urgency and staying home—and thereby possibly crippling
their own means of economic survival for the greater good.

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But as a long as we are using war analogies, let’s just point out
that during World War II, New York actually did pass a pair of extraordinary
laws, the “Emergency Commercial Space Rent Control Law” and the
“Emergency Business Space Rent Control Law,” both in 1945. Those
laws, somewhat unique in American history, were efforts targeted at
mitigating the unbearable pressures on small businesses under war
conditions, when new construction was halted and government
administration was crowding out space. Hated by the real estate
industry, they lasted until 1963.

If mobilizing for the “war on coronavirus” is more than just a
metaphor to justify excruciating levels of human misery, history
says that implies heroic and ingenious solutions to cushion the
worst of its collateral damage, including emergency rent measures.
Again, that’s not pie in the sky; it’s the minimum required for
survival. Otherwise all the “war” talk is just an empty phrase to
cover a cruel void of vision.

The plight of art spaces is definitely not more real than the
plight of immigrant restaurants in
Queens, but it does by its higher-profile nature have a little
bit more visibility. Maybe art can use that visibility to fight for
something that will save itself and also stop the entire fabric
around it from being ripped to bits. #CancelRent.

The post The Art World Needs to Rally Behind the #CancelRent
Movement to Save Itself—and Everyone Else, Too appeared first
on artnet News.